Cream of the Counties

11/01/2017 Jade Smith Features, Passenger Perspective

In the days when Five Counties still comprised routes 9 and 19, one of the Enviro 200s bought for the service arrives in Oakham. *DAVID BELL*

Peterborough has several exceptionally long bus routes. In the third of an occasional series, Andy Izatt samples another of them which traverses five counties to reach Nottingham

As CBW has highlighted in the past, the magazine’s home town of Peterborough, perhaps somewhat unusually, is where several particularly long bus routes radiate from. Two of those have already been featured in the magazine. Stagecoach Midlands Gold X4 which takes around three and a half hours to reach Milton Keynes appeared in the December 9, 2014 (1167) issue while First Eastern Counties marathon X1 to Lowestoft, a four hour, 45-minute ride involving a change in bus was covered on July 28, 2015 (Issue 1199).

Centrebus’ Five Counties route 19 is another long one taking just under three hours to reach Nottingham via Oakham, Melton Mowbray and some particularly beautiful East Midlands countryside along the way. It’s a distance of around 60 miles, so having sampled the other two routes, I decided to see what it had to offer before Christmas.

Five Counties is an amalgamation of service 9 between Peterborough and Oakham and route 19 from there to Nottingham. It’s only recently that the number 19 has been used throughout.

The 9 was a Kimes Buses of Folkingham service that had been renumbered from 11 to 9 and extended from Stamford through to Oakham in 2004 as part of the CrossCountry network jointly sponsored by Peterborough City Council and Rutland County Council. Kimes Buses was taken over by Centrebus in July 2011.

Route 19 was operated by […]

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