Every route 100. 15 of 26.

Saturday 20th July 2024

We’re in south Wales for this ride on one of Britain’s 26 bus routes numbered 100. It’s one of only two route 100s in Wales and both can be found close to Cardiff.

This 100 is operated by Edwards Coaches. Edwards is a long standing well known coach and bus operator based in Llantrisant operating seven bus routes in the Pontypridd-Llantrisant-Cardiff area as well as express coaches for National Express, its own extensive coach tour programme and private and group coach hire.

Edwards’ route 100 connects Pontypridd with the communities of Church Village, Llantwit Fardre and Beddau continuing to Llantrisant and Talbot Green before terminating at the nearby large Royal Glamorgan Hospital. The company operates the route with five year old ADL Enviro200 MMC single decks with very comfortable seats (you can tell it’s a coach operator too) in its distinctive blue and pink livery which includes bespoke branding for the route.

Conveniently it’s a 55 minute end-to-end run so with five minutes layover at each terminus it takes four buses to provide a half hourly service on Mondays to Saturdays with one bus providing seven return journeys on Sundays.

The timetable includes an extensive span of day from 05:20 to 23:08 with a later journey on Fridays and Saturdays leaving Pontypridd at 23:50, arriving Talbot Green at 00:28.

I took a ride one Saturday lunch time a few weeks ago to get a feel for the travel patterns served by the route and, admittedly based on only this one journey, it came across to me that Pontypridd is the main attractor for the route with the smaller commercial centre at Talbot Green, adjacent to Llantrisant being less strong.

For example, leaving Pontypridd bus station, with its roof reminiscent of Stratford in east London, at 13:00 …

….we had three on board with 10 getting on at the next bus stop closer to the town’s main retail activity. They were mostly shoppers going home and a mixture of young and old, male and female.

Three travelled just a few stops locally in Pontypridd, three more a few stops further on, three got off in Church Village where one boarded and four alighted in Beddau with one of the Pontypridders travelling as far as Talbot Green.

Three boarded in Beddau with two families boarding in Llantrisant in a bit of a flap as the bus they were waiting for hadn’t arrived so they were trying to plan an alternative route and caught the 100 to Talbot Green where the other three also alighted leaving just me on board for the seven minute journey on to the Royal Glamorgan Hospital which includes a short deviation to serve the Edwards Business Parc (spelt with a c) where Edwards has its base alongside other activities, which led me to wonder whether the company owns all the surrounding land and hence its name being applied to the whole area.

It comes across as a very useful route linking communities not on the line of the topographically formed valleys in this part of south Wales but instead cutting across from north east to south west against that natural landscape.

The route involves two dog legs to serve Beddau and the Edwards Business Parc as well as a circuit of a residential area south of Llantrisant by Cross Inn.

Perhaps befitting a coach company, the driver had Radio 2 playing out over the PA speakers which featured Gary Davies playing the top 20 from summer 1981 on the iconic Pick of the Pops. It provided a very nostalgic backdrop for my journey as I worked in south Wales during that period 43 years ago and remembered every record playing including Kim Carnes famous hit ‘Bette Davis Eyes”…

… and not least, the very apposite ‘All Those Years Ago’ by George Harrison which reached number 13 in the BBC chart …. all those years ago.

Roger French

Did you catch the other fourteen ‘Every route 100’ blogs so far? Here’s 1 of 26 (Stevenage-Hitchin) 2 of 26 (Crawley-Redhill), 3 of 26 (Lincoln-Scunthorpe), 4 of 26 (Glasgow-Riverside Museum), 5 of 26 (Campbeltown local), 6 of 26 (Guildford’s Onslow Park & Ride), 7 of 26 (Warrington-Manchester), 8 of 26 Chatham-St Mary’s Island, 9 of 26 St Paul’s-Wapping, 10 of 26 Syston-Melton Mowbray, 11 of 26 Wellington-Telford Sutton Hill, 12 of 26 Hanley-Stone, 13 of 26 Burgess Hill-Horsham, 14 of 26 Aylesbury-Milton Keynes.

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