Biggleswade’s new link with Cambridge

Tuesday 20th January 2026

Councillors from Central Bedfordshire Council have long held ambitions for a bus route to connect Biggleswade directly with Cambridge and from the beginning of this year got their wish granted by introducing new route X75 using the Council’s Bus Service Improvement Plan funds.

Biggleswade is well served with Grant Palmer’s hourly route 74 between Bedford and Hitchin (as well as hourly routes 72/73 via Sandy to Bedford and 200 to Shefford and Flitwick) but Cambridge, for many years, has been one county boundary too far for a direct link from market town to university city.

Now AtoB Travel has been awarded a two year contract to trial new route X75 deploying one bus operating a fairly restricted timetable of four return journeys designed around one driver’s duty incorporating a morning school run on another route and a garage positioning journey at the start and end of the day.

Central Bedfordshire’s news release announcing the new X75 talks up the new service with an excited Councillor Tracey Wye (Executive Member for Sustainability and Climate Resilience) saying…

End to end journey time is just over an hour with intermediate locations served being Sandy, Potton and Wrestlingworth and (in neighbouring Cambridgeshire) Tadlow, Wimpole and Barton.

Central Bedfordshire Council reckons the first bus leaving Biggleswade at 06:28 is “aimed at commuters and students” but with an arrival into Cambridge as early as 07:40 it looks to me more like a journey timed to allow the bus to head off to operate a school journey elsewhere with Bedfordshire commuters having to fit around that. All the more so as the bus then disappears from the timetable before reappearing at 09:09 mid route in the hamlet of Tadlow to return to Biggleswade for the next Cambridge bound journey at 09:58.

Presumably that is aimed at shoppers who, on arrival at 11:04 have either around three and a half hours in Cambridge before returning on the 14:40 or just over six hours on the 17:15 back from Cambridge which is presumably also timed for those returning commuters and students having clocked up a 12 hour day. In between 11:04 and 14:40 the bus returns to Biggleswade where the driver has an hour’s break before another trip to Cambridge at 13:23.

I took a ride on that 13:23 from Biggleswade Interchange last Monday, the new route’s second week. The ‘interchange’ is alongside the station just a couple of minutes journey time from the bus station in the town centre. The bus appeared at 13:18 and it was my lucky day, being a brand new Volvo eVoRa not long with the company and still with a smart pristine interior.

We left the Interchange empty but picked up two passengers at the bus station, one travelling to Sandy and the other to Potton. There’d been a Grant Palmer 72 departure at 13:10 to Potton and Sandy with the next departure direct to Sandy on the 73 at 14:14. Like Grant Palmer’s 73, after leaving Biggleswade the X75 travels fast along the A1 taking just 14 minutes. In Sandy we picked two more passengers up with one travelling to Potton (who’d been on a 72 that had come to grief in Sandy on its way to Potton and Biggleswade) and the other travelled all the way to Cambridge. Once our two Potton passengers had alighted it was just that other passenger and myself through to Cambridge, although we did pick three passengers up making a local journey between Newnham and Cambridge.

When we got to Potton the friendly driver explained we were on diversion due to a road closure through Tadlow so I hope anyone waiting there was not left stranded as there didn’t seem to be any information about the changed route (via Guilden Morden and Wendy) which thanks to some excellent driving only added a couple of minutes to the overall journey time.

A regular blog reader, Paul, passed on some feedback about the route from a friend “who works in the bus industry, lives in Biggleswade, and travelled on one of the first day’s workings of the X75.” He encouragingly reports “I’ve done my best to promote it locally, having distributed several hundred timetables with some of our Community Newsletters as well as putting up all the roadside publicity this week.” And even more positively added “we took around a dozen passengers into Cambridge and brought 14 out” clarifying they were travelling as “a fairly even mix of Biggleswade, Sandy and Potton, plus a slightly surprising one at Wimpole. One also travelled from Potton to Sandy on the way back.”

Even more encouraging was an email I received from another blog reader, Katie, who “gave it a go” on Saturday with a “full load of 31 from Potton on the first Cambridge bound departure on the A2B minibus”. As Katie observes “not bad for its second Saturday”.

It’ll be interesting to see whether this level of patronage can be sustained once the novelty of a new bus route wears off. The X75 is perhaps just the kind of bus route Bus Service Improvement Plan funding is designed for; connecting small towns and locations (Biggleswade’s population is 22,000, Sandy’s 12,000 and Potton’s 5,000) with large regional centres like Cambridge. And two years should be long enough to see whether sufficient passengers can be generated on a consistent basis to make it sustainable. By the look of things, two weeks seems to be enough.

Well done to Paul’s friend for distributing publicity about the service although I didn’t spot any timetables in Cambridge’s Drummer Street bus station but it was good to see it listed on the electronic departure displays as it was at Biggleswade Interchange too…

… with printed departures as well.

Good luck to the X75.

Roger French

Blogging timetable: 06:00 TThS