Thursday 20th November 2025
You don’t have to spend long in Bury St Edmunds bus station to appreciate the variety of bus operators serving the town.
Stephensons and Mulleys are frequent visitors…
… as well as Coach Services…
…Chambers and Simonds CountryLink…
… both now owned by…
…Transport Made Simple.
For a town of around 45,000 population it pleasingly has a significant sized bus station with 14 bays (10 drive on/reverse off and four drive through) with two long shelters for passengers to wait under and keep nice and dry…
… and even an enclosed substantial waiting room with toilets that are both in use and kept in excellent condition.
OK, the facilities in the bus shelters themselves are pretty basic and may be past their prime having been around for decades but steps have been taken to improve things with electronic departure displays…
… and there are posters explaining what bus routes depart from each bay as well as a network map for the area.
Suffolk County Council hasn’t been at the forefront of excellence in bus stop information provision in recent years but I was pleasantly surprised to find so much on display both in the bus station at each departure bay…
… and in the shelter alongside the railway station.
Bury St Edmunds is one of those places where the station is frustratingly a 10-12 minute walk from the town’s bus station and main commercial/retail centre, but many buses also serve the station as they head off to the north and east of the town
The one negative I picked up was despite changes to bus routes being advertised by the bus operators commencing at the beginning of September…
… these haven’t been incorporated into any of the Suffolk County Council produced departure time displays and maps making for a confusing presentation for passengers. All the more so as this information was supposedly updated to 12th September
One of these changes which had taken me to Bury St Edmunds, thanks to a tip-off by blog reader Julian, was to take a ride on a brand new rural bus route numbered M40 introduced back in the summer.
Julian picked up on this from an interestingly worded notice posted in Bury St Edmunds by Stowmarket based Dan’s Coach Travel. Dan is just 32 and set up his own bus and coach company in 2018. He runs just the one commercially operated bus route alongside his coach operations, namely route DB1 linking Stowmarket and a whole host of Suffolk villages with Bury St Edmunds.
The notice explained that an upcoming “new hourly service” led Dan to make “the tough decision to withdraw our Thurston service to make way for the new provider”.
The notice, dated 27th May, also explained “the new service has been delayed and is now not expected to start in August” giving alternatives for residents to use, not least the hourly train service from the village to Bury St Edmunds with a journey time of six minutes. It looks like Dan took the opportunity to streamline the route of the DB1 so it no longer served Thurston (as well as two other smaller hamlets, Norton and Tostock).
I took a ride on the M40 to try and work out the rationale behind it, especially as Julian pointed out the journey time for Thurston passengers is somewhat protracted (up to 46 minutes)not helped by the circuitous nature of the route taken as the bus travels around the village as you can see from the maps above and below.
In the event, when the timetable began on 7th July it was hourly into Bury St Edmunds only between 07:30 and 10:30 with a two hourly frequency for the rest of the day until departures back from Bury St Edmunds at 16:15 and 17:30. Most of the service needs just the one bus, with an extra peak bus to serve West Suffolk College.
I caught the 12:15 departure from Bury St Edmunds.
We left the bus station with six adults, one of whom had three children with her. One alighted eight minutes later near Farnham St Martin with the Mum and kids alighting in Great Barton after 15 minutes. The other four alighted as we toured the village of Thurston.
As we did so, what came through was just how much house building is going on in every corner of the place with the footprint of the built up area expanding considerably.
It made me think the service is almost certainly funded by Section 106 payments from these developers and the friendly driver, Jason, explained the contract for the route is for two years which would fit with this theory.
Whether enough new residents moving in will be attracted to use such a circuitous bus route with unattractive journey times by July 2027 is a moot point. If the route is struggling for survival by that time I doubt if Dan will reroute his DB1 back into Thurston as by then passengers using that route from Stowmarket and villages such as Emswell and Woolpit will have got used to a quicker ride into and out of Bury St Edmunds along the A14.
I caught the 13:45 departure from Bury St Edmunds on the DB1…
… to see how numbers travelling compared to the M40…
…and was pleasantly surprised to see an impressive queue of 31 passengers boarding the bus which was on stand from its incoming journey and welcoming passengers on board as early as 13:30.
I was one of the last to board and met Chris the very smartly turned out and friendly driver and my eye was caught by a pile of printed timetables which I’d seen passengers helping themselves to as they boarded.
Dan had also posted the up to date timetable in the bus stand and I’d also seen it at the railway station. This was just as well as from 1st September the timetable was extended to include Saturdays as well as Mondays to Fridays thanks to BSIP funding but Suffolk County Council hasn’t updated its displays which over two months on makes no mention of it.
The timetable comprises four journeys into Bury St Edmunds arriving at 08:27, 10:57, 13:27 and 17:12 with five returning at 08:45, 11:15, 13:45, 16:30 and 18:15. It also caters for school children which helps to make the service a commercial proposition.
Dan tells me Wednesdays are always a good day as it’s market day in Bury St Edmunds but numbers can be in the 20s on other days still making for a successful service. We picked up five more passengers during the journey across to Stowmarket with most alighting in Elmswell (seven) and Stowmarket itself (seven) with others getting off in Woolpit (three), and Haughley (two). In Stowmarket the route includes a nine minute loop in the north east of the town as well as continuing south to Combs Ford after the town centre on request on some journeys.
What struck me most about the journey was just how friendly it was with many of the passengers obviously regulars and knew each other, chatting away and saying fond farewells as they left the bus. It’s one of those routes which is a credit to the operator and long may Dan’s success continue.
Roger French
Blogging timetable: 06:00 TThS
BusAndTrainUser 
Looking at their web site, Central Connect seem to be repeating the error that Arriva made in Hertfordshire, thinking that renumbering all your routes into a single two-digit sequence is easier for the passenger.
In fact, its anything but, since the user is confronted with a list of routes which are scattered across the network. In Central Connect’s case Loughborough and Derby routes are all jumbled up with Stevenage town services.
I think the best solution remains the old London Country approach of prefixed series for each set of town services combined with something like Midland Red’s regional based numbering for the country and interurban services.
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Phil,
I think you mean the Midland Red approach of prefixed series for town services which was introduced by them way back in the 1920s, before London Transport was created (let alone London Country!). Both Midland Red and London Transport’s Country section used regional/zonal route numbers, although there was always some bleedthrough in Midland Red’s case with services not quite numbered logically.
I do agree with your point, because the prevalence of service 1s etc. operated by the same company make looking for timetables on the operators’ websites a mess. The only other thing I’d ask for would be a more consistent use of suffix letters as well; West Midlands PTE had the right idea with their plan that A should only ever mean anti-clockwise circular and C clockwise circular (amongst others), although they never actually managed to get it introduced fully.
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Back in BMMO days it was :
D for Dudley eg D5
B for Birmingham & Brierley Hill eg B87
K for Kidderminster eg K2
R for Redditch eg R5
S for Stourbridge eg S47
W for Worcester eg W10
to name just a few across Birmingham, Black Country & Worcestershire.
When they were taking on West Midlands Travel Metrowest revived some of the historic number
The ever excellent Diamond Bus West Midlands still use the S prefix for some school services.
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On behalf of Central Connect I would say that the website ordering was more a believed limitation of the current site than any deliberate action. But your comment has prompted a query with our web provider and we are exploring whether we can change and more clearly identify services by region in the short-medium term before a massively upgraded website, with more defined regional grouping and local pages launches in 2026 (month TBC).
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Tricky , it should be possible to l/list by an alias of the displayed number , but not possible for a user to sort by that alias since they wont know it.
JBC Prestatyn
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I hope you enjoyed your visit to my neck of the woods! Bury and the surrounding area is lovely and you get some lovely views of the fields and countryside from a double decker especially going through the Fornhams.
A friend of mine organises trips for a village social club and has used Dan’s Coach Travel for several years and has nothing but good words for the company and their staff.
I don’t know if you’d heard about it before your visit, but the roadworks to redesign the Tollgate junction have been causing a lot of complaints locally, especially from Coach Services.
There are apparently other delays on the 84/86 route too as they’ve announced some journeys on the 84 (Mon-Fri) won’t be running until the 21st December – https://www.coachservicesltd.co.uk/temporary-change-service-8486.
Coach Services seem like a good company who work hard on their customer communication so the comment “During this time the online timetables will not be changed so please keep this in mind when planning your journey.” as I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard to add a note to to the timetable page? If you do end up back this way before the 21st have a ride on the 84/86 and see what you think of the roadworks and the views from the top deck!
J
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Neither have they changed the Journey Planner information, so any casual inquiry will show all of those journeys as continuing to operate. This will likely flow through to all third party sites – Google, Traveline and so on.
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The point about on line timetables surely is that they can be updated far faster than a printed one (in leaflet and book form). Cannot a web page show – for information – the normal service and the temporary service ?
JBC Prestatyn
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we has a recent stay walking the local paths. It was difficult to understand the buses, but GoAhead provided good timetables 2 days after changeover. Now GoAhead are gone. Roadworks everywhere seriously disrupted so one day a taxi was needed. Bury St Edmunds has 700 listed buildings and one of the grandstand inside and especially outside is Wetherspoons. Ray Wilkes
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Quite an interesting and unusual situation now in Bury, that with Go-Ahead departing, and Stagecoach last year, there are no “group” operations in the Town. And thus “Independent” operation, which always made East Anglia fascinating, is 100%. Even in the days of Eastern Counties working much in the area, there was always a Chambers and Mulleys plus a few others around, services then terminating on Market Hill if memory serves correctly.
The DB1 really does seem quite an unusual (and brave!) success story for the times, and serves many areas and creates links that have not existed either for many years or at all at such frequencies. It shows the potential for untapped demand which does exist, and clearly the “bush telegraph” that operates very successfully in rural life has spread the word in this case. Many people love the “social” aspect of rural services, and it is why DRT is such a failure when trying to replace fixed services.
Terence Uden
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re your comment on DRT. It’s difficult to have a ‘social’ aspect on a DRT when you are the only passenger!
MotCO
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Bury St Edmunds, buses and me. This was for a JDW trail, on 06/09/1996. NSE railway discount from Hersham as far as Cambridge, thence a Cambus Out’n About ticket for £4.10 to reach Bury St Edmunds. Route X11 refers (F516NJE). Banking business then a late luncheon at “The Wolf” JDW before heading home. Route X11 (F515NJE) as far as Newmarket (where the King’s racing colours ar manufactured) for more drinks. Then Route 111 (K973HUB) to Cambridge city centre and a local Route 95 (L656MFL) back to the station. I broke journey for more drinks in Stevenage and had haulage back to King’s Cross (91.031). This was at the expense of Great Aunt Joyce Harris (my late Godmother) who left me £1,000 in her will. It was transport money as she used to work for London Transport for the Lifts, Escalators & Pumps Department at Griffith House. As Griffith House was where the Publicity Department was also located Joyce rubbed shoulders with the good and the great who wrote books for London Transport when it was its own publisher. As I worked in London concurrently as Joyce worked for LT, I would often get her to obtain LT books for me at the staff discount. Collecting them from her at lunchtimes cost me nothing as I was a Go As You Please ticket holder at the time. Other jaunts on Joyce’s legacy took me to: Leicester, Birmingham, Grantham, Cheltenham Spa, Margate, Kettering, Warwick, and Dover. There was another awkward trip too: Bournemouth and Gosport on the same day. It was odd that day, visiting Bury St Edmunds by bus as this was also familiar motorcycle territory for me!
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Apologies if this is a silly question, but I can’t remember go-ahead serving Bury St Edmunds at all – what would the buses have been branded as and what routes?
I can remember First Bus having several routes and a garage in the town but they pulled out years ago and I can’t for the life of realising that go-ahead ran buses in Bury.
Thanks,
J
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Go-Ahead appeared in Bury St. Edmunds in 2012 when they acquired both Hedingham & District Omnibuses and H.C. Chambers & Son. Chambers had first advertised a service to Bury from their base at Bures St. Mary on June 30th 1920 while Hedingham’s Wednesday service to the town had come from their acquisition of C & R Coaches in 1982.
Latterly the Hedingham and Chambers businesses had become a brand name of Konectbus and just before the sale to “Transport Made Simple” were being branded as Konectbus.
Before the advent of the council owned bus station, the terminus for the independent operators was Angel Hill. Buses and coaches from far and wide gathered there every Wednesday, some with duplicates, others with doubledeckers. I well remember a journey from Hadleigh circa 1984 on an ex WMPTE Daimler Fleetline of Charles Joshua Partridge & Son which carried a standing load in to Bury despite its 80 seats.
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Thank you – didn’t realise they were Go-Ahead owned companies!
J
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Thank you, I didn’t realise Hedingham, Chambers and Konectbus were Go-Ahread companies. Where I am I only really see Stephensons, Coach Services and Mulleys buses on a regular basis.
J
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Dan sounds like this generation’s Norman Sanders (RIP), who started Sanders Coaches in Holt. Initially relying on a lot of support from Gresham’s public school and holiday trips, but expanded into scheduled bus services to eventually kick out Eastern Counties after bus deregulation.
MilesT
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Bury St. E’s one of the parts of East Anglia that is not included in the Network railcard, and therefore also there isn’t a London Zonal Boundary Fare published (when, considering the distance from London, it should be on Network railcard and have a boundary fare, or at least a boundary fare, the limitation of boundary fare to Network railcard area is quite arbitrary).
Sometimes split ticket at the boundary of Network railcard area helps.
Also for tourists it’s worth knowing that car parking is scarce and expensive in the town and strictly enforced; all day parking is attached to hotels or is 10 mins walk from town centre
(I was recently in Bury for an event where I needed a car to transport equipment, more than I could carry on the train, and discovered this issue).
MilesT
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Breaking New
First bus pulling out of Cornwall
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Mostly to be replaced by GoAhead according to a statement on the Plymouth Citybus website (but not the same company’s Transport for Cornwall website for some reason).
https://www.plymouthbus.co.uk/go-cornwall-bus-update
I can’t link to the FirstBus statement on their website as it doesn’t like my VPN and won’t let me in!
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Rogers excellent article previously predicted Firsts fate in Cornwall.
Now for his next Blog we need Roger to have a go at predicting the next National Lottery Draw Results!
The slow death of Western National began when they withdrew from Devon & now Cornwall.
It echoes the withdrawal from Hereford, North Worcestershire & The Black Country, Northampton, Southampton etc etc.
Frankly if a business is not committed to a sector then then divestment is the only option.
First seem to cling onto First Midland Red Buses Limited in Worcestershire perhaps as a spring board to West Midlands Bus franchising as a bidder.
With thier return to London nothing surprises me about FirstGroup perhaps the bizarre next strategic step is with franchising if they decide to bid & win on a Transport for West Midlands tranche then a snappy name for the operations could be The Birmingham And Midland Motor Omnibus Company.
Funny I am sure I have that somewhere before………
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Working part time for Dan’s Coach Travel I received training on the DB1 a few Saturdays ago , I looked at the Suffolk County Council website prior for the Saturday service and there was no information available ! It is a great service with friendly locals and it is certainly a community asset. Also don’t forget Fareline ,Suffolk most quirky bus operation ventures into Bury .
When covering rail replacement duties the housing estates in Elmswell and Thurston seem to appear at a shockingly quick rate within six months another field is full of uninspiring rabbit hutches.
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Transport connections through Glastonbury diss appeared when the rail line from there to Wells closed in th early 1950s. Buses appeared with the closure of the Somerset and Dorset line south from Bath whean Somervale Coaches http://www.countrybus.co.uk/somervale.htm with retired e Western Welsh Lelands. Growing up in the Wells area at the time I recall Bristol Omnibus running a Bristol Grehound operating a route south to Bournemouth which basically duplicated the rail line and I recall a jurney on one of their Bristol MW coaches when we ran empty for the entire journey. This was before the days of bus grant an do not think operation lasted very long.
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