Following their acquisition of bus operations from Johnsons Excelbus earlier this year, Diamond Buses took over running of the X20 service between Stratford-upon-Avon and Coventry, via Henley-in-Arden, Hockley Heath, Shirley, Solihull, Meriden and Allesley.
This service currently runs Monday to Saturday only, Sunday journeys between Shirley and Stratford are currently provided by the X50 service, which runs from Birmingham city centre all the way to Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire.
From Sunday 24th July, service X50 will be withdrawn by Diamond, following the loss of the Warwickshire County Council contract.
It will be replaced by Sunday journeys added to the X20 timetable between Stratford and Solihull only, and will be operated by Stagecoach Midlands every two hours.
From Monday 15th August, the X20 will be operated by Diamond Bus between Solihull and Coventry only.
Stagecoach will be operating journeys between Stratford and Solihull, also as service X20.
I did ask Simon Dunn of Diamond Buses whether it would have been more logical to renumber their service back to 82:
We suggested this, but TfWM who subsidise the service want to keep the service number as the X20
It makes no sense to me to have two seperate bus services in Solihull, both numbered as X20, but going to completely different destinations.
(I think it’s more likely that TfWM don’t want to stump up the cash to have all the bus stop flags updated)
There was of course previously an 82 service between Solihull and Coventry, that Diamond did operate under contract to TfWM, and formed part of their Solihull Signature network.
Historically, the X20 service operated between Birmingham city centre and Stratford-upon-Avon for many years, until it was withdrawn by Johnsons in 2018.
On acquiring the 82 TfWM contract from Diamond, Johnsons combined their 20 (Stratford to Shirley) service with the 82 (Solihull to Coventry), to create a ‘new’ X20 service (Stratford to Coventry).
Personally, while I think its sad how things have turned out, I don’t think it is really beneficial to passengers to now have two wholly seperate services with the same route number going to different destinations from the same starting point (Solihull).
Update
From Sunday 28th August, Stagecoach will take over the Solihull to Coventry journeys having been awarded the contract by TfWM.
This means that the X20 will once again become a single service operating from Stratford to Coventry via Solihull, Monday to Saturday; Sunday service will continue to operate between Stratford and Solihull only.
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