There has been a public transport link between the Derbyshire town of Ripley and the City of Nottingham for over a century.
A tramway between the two destinations opened as early as 1914.
This in turn was replaced in 1933 by trolleybuses.
When I moved to the East Midlands in the 1960’s, the trolleybuses had gone to be replaced by buses run by the ‘Midland General Omnibus Company’. (MGOC).
This situation continued until 1971 when the ‘MGOC’ came under the control of ‘Trent Motor Traction’ as it was then after the formation of the
‘National Bus Company in 1969.
‘Trent’s route eventually became the Rainbow1 then ‘rainbowone’.
The route was unusual that buses were all identified as rainbowone even though they ran from three places, Alfreton, Heanor and Ripley.
At Eastwood the three routes combined to run to Nottingham every 10 minutes.
This continued until 2011 when one of the two per hour Ripley rainbowones became ‘rapid1’ into Nottingham.
This ran non stop from Langley Mill along the A610, a considerable saving in time.
2018 saw a second rainbowone introduced from Ripley making two buses an hour plus the rapidone.
The timings from this point were unfortunate in that departures from Ripley during
the day were timed as rainbowone at XX-15 and XX-45 with the rapidone being timed at XX-20.
Effectively the XX-15 and the XX-20 buses were competing with each other as far as Langley Mill.
The same thing happened on the return journey with the two services competing from Heanor back to Ripley.
Not surprisingly the ‘rapidone’ attracted very little local traffic that was swept up by the ‘rainbowone’.
So in early 2020 the decision was taken to axe the ‘rapidone’ service.
The buses used in the early days were Volvo B7RLE’s with Wright bodies.
They were replaced in 2014 by new Optare Versas which in turn were replaced in 2018 Volvo B7RLE’s with Wright bodies.
Full circle then!
The two Versas being redeployed on strengthening the rainbowone services.
FJ09 BXE ‘trentbarton’ No. 740 ‘rapid 1’. Volvo B7RLE / Wright Eclipse Urban
on Dennis Basford’s railsroadsrunways.blogspot.co.uk’
YJ14 BSU ‘trentbarton’ No. 851 ‘rapidone’. OptareV1170 Versa
on Dennis Basford’s railsroadsrunways.blogspot.co.uk’
FJ08 WHS ‘trentbarton’ No. 727 ‘rapidone’. Volvo B7RLE / Wright Eclipse Urban
on Dennis Basford’s railsroadsrunways.blogspot.co.uk’
‘rapidone waves goodbye’.
