Thursday 11th June 2026
Passing through Stowmarket a few weeks ago to take a ride on the new bus route down to Hadleigh I noticed a few oddities about the Greater Anglia run railway station.
It’s a lovely station building sporting two plaques that record its restoration was a joint project between British Rail (remember them?) and the Railway Heritage Trust and was completed in 1987 with two “British Rail customers” (Miss A M C Davy and Miss E E Westgate) performing the unveiling ceremonies.
Which presumably explains why there are two plaques. Miss Davy unveiled one and Miss Westgate the other.
The only problem is, almost 40 years later, there are some aspects of the frontage which look rather dodgy.
Not least it’s a shame there are metal barriers around both extreme ends of the building each sporting a faded sign inviting tenants to call an unidentifiable phone number.
Sadly it doesn’t look very encouraging.
However, the shelter to the left of the building, which is presumably meant for bus passengers, must be one of the most wonderful brick built bus shelters of its kind and pleasingly had no barriers around it, although sadly no seats inside either.
Because if you got off a train and decided to wait for a bus, until new route 51 began with its six departures a day on Mondays to Fridays, there wasn’t much of a bus service to and from the bus stop at the station. Which led me to examine the timetable on display at the bus stop.
As I highlighted in the recent blog about route 51, no information about the route was on display during my visit but there were details of the departures of two other routes – route 6 and route VC1.
Mini Switzerland this isn’t.
Route 6 will take you to Abbey Gardens in Bury St Edmonds and route VC1 to Station Road West shown as four minutes away.
Looking in more detail at the departures you can see what is called VC001 (not sure why the two 00s are added – but then I don’t know why it has a VC either) has just one departure at 10:22 on MWF and 10:27 on TuTh…
… while route 6 has one departure on Saturday at 10:46 but then only on the ‘3rd Sa’ – also shown for some unkown reason as ‘3rdSat’ too with both being explained in the key below. And you might also spot that there’s a number 5 before the MWF and TuTh for route 6 which in the key indicates the departure is “Funded by UK Government”.
I do wonder whether anyone at Suffolk County Council responsible for displaying this information ever stops to seriously think about how ridiculous this looks to the public.
Not only that, but it’s complete rubbish too. According to Suffolk County Council’s own online timetables, the VC001 operated by Stowmarket Minibus & Coach Hire Ltd picks up at 10:29 on MWF and 10:34 on TuTh…
… and picks up again at 13:05 (both MWF and TuTh) to Finningham (MWF) or Gislingham (TuTh) but these journeys don’t appear on the station display.
It’s even worse news concerning the 3rdSa (and 3rdSat) route 6 operated by High Suffolk Community Transport to Bury St Edmonds as the timetable on its website doesn’t list Stowmarket railway station as a pick up point, the nearest one being Stowupland just outside Stowmarket at 10:37…
… and a map showing the bus stops it does pick up at also excludes the railway station so one could reasonably conclude it no longer stops there.
It’s no loss for passengers since there’s a frequent Greater Anglia train linking the two towns.
In more positive news when I was there a few weeks ago, work was nearing completion on the substantial new footbridge and lifts to what’s called a ‘modular design’ and will make the station fully accessible without the need for passengers to use a level crossing just beyond the station to cross the tracks.
The lifts hadn’t been commissioned during my visit – so it was a case of walking up and down all 36 steps (four blocks of nine).
I’m sure the lifts are now available and the welcome work is no doubt fully completed.
But the installation has cost a staggering £5.5 million from the Access for All scheme, so maybe there’ll be a big number 5 on the lift doors to confirm they’re “Funded by UK Government”.
As a final observation while I was in between journeys at Hadleigh I noticed the timetable displays in the bus shelters in Magdalen Road Bus Station were a classic case of ‘code overload’ with some journeys sporting three codes to decipher.
Here’s an enlargement of the lower portion shown above for your enjoyment.
And if you’re wondering about that tagline “Wonderlust by Bus – your discovery map for inspirational car-free Suffolk adventures” at the bottom of that timetable case …. if you’re unable to “pick one up at your local library!” …. it’s also available online here and well worth a click through if you like to see what website creators such as Ascender Creative can do when “Funded by UK Government“.
Shame the new route 51 isn’t included!
Roger French
Summer blogging timetable: 06:00 TThSSu
BusAndTrainUser 
Fascinating report, thanks Roger. My surmise is that the pictorial plaque was provided by the Heritage Trust, and records that Miss Davy (not Davey) and Miss Westgate removed some builders’ sheeting from (a portion of?) the restored frontage itself. And the second plaque, provided by British Rail, records only its own unveiling.
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Many thanks for spotting that. Typo now corrected.
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I think Roger you’ve won the almost impossible challenge of finding a timetable format that’s even more complex than that of Arriva’s PDFs.
Opps, I forgot, you can’t actually view or download Arriva’s PDFs at the moment….. 😂
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Perhaps part of the newly-enlightened better-integration regime at the DfT could be sharpening up bus information at railway stations, as well as trying to make sure there are more and better timed buses. But a thing I have wondered about for years – since the 1950s in fact – is why bus operators do not display their timetables etc. in LARGE PRINT – after all the space is free – car sales businesses frequently pay to make use of bus stops, and you can read their advertisements from 100 metres away! Large print information is good not just for people with sight difficulties, but for all of us, when the timetable case is misted up, or badly lit at night, or covered with graffiti, or when there’s a big crowd all trying to see it at the same time, or if you are small and trying to read the top line …
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I visited Stowmarket only last week, arriving via bus DB1 from Bury St Edmunds (following in Roger’s footsteps from a while ago). I entirely concur with his summation of Stowmarket Station, and the independent coffee shop is pretty good as well!!
The DB1 service has recently had a minor timetable change, and it was noticeable that Dan had been out overposting the Suffolk CC times with corrected timetables along the whole route. One of the revisions involved a journey running 15 minutes earlier, so having corrected times available was imperitive . . . why oh why don’t LTAs realise the essential importance of updating bus stop times IN GOOD TIME??
I agree with Roger that the presentation of bus stop timetables is unclear . . . Joe Passenger really doesn’t care about funding of bus journeys. I do recall that Suffolk’s timetable booklets (sadly now long gone) were just as bad, and had obviously been computer-produced without any sort of sense check to see if they were understandable.
I note that the DB1 buses, whilst immaculate both inside and out, were actually around 20 years old, and my bus rattled rather. There were a few through passengers, and we set down and picked up along the route, with a total of 12 passengers for the trip. There WERE new timetable leaflets available on the bus.
My day continued with a quick scurry up to Diss by train to ride on the TMS service 70 back to Bury St Edmunds. I couldn’t find any on-line information about this route, until I realised that it’s still on the Simonds website! Thank goodness for http://www.bustimes.org, which is my go-to source now (along with busatlas.uk, of course!). Norfolk CC seldom posts bus stop timetables nowadays preferring a QR code, although Diss Bus Station did have some (but not all) timetables displayed.
What is more concerning was that there were two lovely maps of local bus routes on show at Diss. . . which disagreed with each other!! One looked to be a Simonds version, with the 113/114 routes to Eye and Ipswich replaced by routes 75/75A/75B; the other showed routes 113/114 as being current, and is probably a Norfolk CC version that has yet to be updated.
All three buses on Route 70 were ‘deckers; although not over-busy we carried around 20 passengers on the trip, with several travelling through to BSE. I suspect that numbers at school times may require the capacity. What I did note is that we left Diss about 3 minutes late, and arrived at Bury Station 10 minutes late, despite a very fast journey . . . as usual, poorly co-ordinated temporary traffic lights (three sets) caused the delay, but the next trip back to Diss would’ve departed late as a consequence. I have noticed that other TMS routes are also very tightly timed . . . I agree that too much time is just as annoying, but a better balance needs to be struck here.
It really is time that TMS provided comprehensive websites . . . after all, it’s almost a year since the takeover of Konect was finalised; Simonds routes are still on a standalone website. I’m also surprised that the legal lettering still refers to Dereham.
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Flagfinders still have seperate siters as well though they only run a couple for public bus services
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The DB1 is worth a look Roger when next in Stowmarket or Bury St Edmunds
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On a positive note, the train service from Stowmarket received a significant enhancement at the recent timetable change as both of the half-hourly off-peak Norwich to London Liverpool Street trains now stop there; previously only one of the two called at Stowmarket.
Combined with the hourly train service to Cambridge and the two-hourly service to Peterborough, Stowmarket is very well connected for a provincial town of its size.
Carllo
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One reason the type of bus stop displays you found at Stowmarket contain so many codes and, probably the errors you saw, is that they are produced by software without much in the way of human intervention.
My own county council has admitted that it’s displays could be improved at certain stops but says that would require “human intervention” and it just doesn’t have the resources for that.
I also suspect that in some local authority areas many errors aren’t spotted because the work of producing the displays is a job in itself and not related to service planning or operation, meaning that the staff concerned don’t have the background knowledge of what runs where.
The automation is also probably the reason for the small type size as the size has to be suitable also for busy stops that do require it and selecting a larger font for some stops would again require intervention in an otherwise automated system.
However, my own gripe is why the displays are always filled from the top down leaving large areas of white space below. Combined with the common practice of mounting the cases too high means that the information is above and sometimes well above the eye level of passengers and therefore illegible anyway.
Jim Davies
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