Most folks have a reasonable idea of where Derby is but not everybody will immediately recognize the name of Ripley.
Ripley is a small market town located through where the A610 from Nottingham passes before it joins the A6 to Manchester at Ambergate. It intersects at Ripley with the B6179 which used to be the A61 which links Derby with Chesterfield.
Its main claim to fame these days is probably that just down the hill at Butterley, lies the home of the Midland Railway Trust.
The town (which incidentally is where I live) is fortunate in that it is reasonably well connected to the rest of the county by Public Transport. Being linked directly with Chesterfield, Derby, Mansfield, Matlock and Nottingham plus a host of smaller towns and villages along the way.
It isn’t often then that the citizens of Ripley are treated to a new bus route and when it does happen it deserves to be commented upon.
There are a number of existing services linking Ripley with Derby. Until today, all were provided by ‘trentbarton’ (tb). The ‘red arrow’ serves the town on its way to and from Chesterfield, Derby and Nottingham. The ‘nines’ group of routes (9.1, 9.2 and 9.3) call in on their way between Derby and Mansfield and the ‘sixes’ group of routes (6.2 and 6.3 ) serve Derby and Ripley via Belper on the A6.
Yesterday saw Heanor based operator ‘yourbus’ (yb) add a further link to Derby by extending their Y1 service from Heanor. With there being no Sunday service to Ripley, today effectively was the start of operations.
‘yb’ began competing with ‘tb’s H1 on the Derby to Heanor service sometime ago where there are up to 8 buses an hour running.
In addition ‘yb‘ extended from Heanor to Eastwood and Alfreton with both services competing with existing ‘tb‘ routes.
‘yb‘ withdrew its Alfreton extension recently and re-directed the service to Ripley.
The new service will provide a useful link for people living to the East of Ripley who previously had no direct service to Derby
So, then that is the story so far. What about the hardware ?
‘yb’ whilst operating a varied bus fleet, have more Mercedes- Benz Citaro’s than any other type.
BD64 NBO
Is seen in a new and much brighter livery than has previously been used.
It was exhibited recently at ‘Euro Bus Expo 2014 at the NEC. My ‘Blog’ dated the 6th. of November has further images of it.
In my view, a considerable improvement over what has gone before. The only one in the fleet in this livery, I believe it is being joined by several more in the same livery in January 2015.
I commented in that ‘Blog’ that I think that the livery application owes a lot to the livery currently applied to ‘Lothian Buses’ vehicles who provide the bulk of the services in Edinburgh.
Other Citaro’s in service in the usual colour scheme are BK13 XYB and BK 13 XYA which are seen here.
It will be interesting to see how it all works out.
Watch this space.....!
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