National Express West Midlands Route 350 351

= National Express West Midlands Route 350/351 =

From UK Transport Wiki
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Service 350 (recently renumbered from service 999) is a shuttle service linking Walsall Town Centre with the nearby Manor Hospital. (route 999 at the time was believed, to been the only route in the whole country with this service number)

The journey takes just 7 minutes to the hospital and 10 minutes return.

Following its recent renumbering and timetable change, the service is interlinked with service 351 (Walsall - Cannock), buses changing routes once in Walsall. As the 351 is operated using non-low floor buses, the 350 is no longer easily accessible. Monday to Friday off-peek frequency has been reduced to hourly, with much annoance from local people. Thus we need more people useing service 350 and 351 before these service are disposed of.

At one stage it was proposed the route be extended to Bloxwich, however this never occurred.

The route used to the follow same route as service 331, however 'A2Z Travel' on 31 March stopped operating after getting their operating licence revoked, and no longer provide this service to the hospital.

Macavity was the name given by several Travel West Midlands bus drivers to a white cat which regularly boarded the bus on its own accord to visit a fish and chip shop down the road. The plain white cat, with one green eye and one blue and whose real name and owners are unknown, would board the 331 along Churchill Road, near to its junction with Kent Road and travel down to the local shops further along the road, which also housed a fish and chip shop.

The cat first boarded the bus unnoticed in January 2007. Drivers then began stopping when they could see the cat waiting, after discovering he was such a good passenger. The cat was nicknamed Macavity after the mystery cat in T. S. Eliot's poem "Macavity", contained in his Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (Macavity is also a character in CATS the musical).

Commenting on the mysterious cat, one National Express West Midlands driver Bill Khunkhun says:

"As soon as I open the doors he jumps on. He seems to like it. It was quite strange at first but now seems normal. He is the perfect passenger. The only problem is he never pays." During evenings and Sundays service 332 links the hospital with the town centre, provided by National Express West Midlands.http://


 * Walsall Town Centre
 * Manor Hospital
 * Walsall Town Centrehttp://

[] Network West Midlands Official Tmetable