It’s just been posted, in the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire thread, that Hulley’s will no longer be running the M17. This is a service operated by a medium-sized bus in the Totley area of Sheffield. Once there were a large number of ‘M’ buses (Midibus?) and I suspect this is the last remnant. I am sure
@tbtc will be able to elucidate.
That’s a great example, I’m annoyed that I didn’t notice one own doorstep!
In the final days before deregulation, there were a handful of “N” services, for Nipper, or Little Nipper, which were minibus routes that ran via the back roads of Sheffield/ Rotherham to target the kind of elderly etc passengers who’d struggle to walk to the main roads, infrequent but exactly the kind of initiative that PTEs used to be good at
The “M” routes were (mainly?) after deregulation, although some “Little Nipper” branding continued.
It was a bit of a strange combination of routes that qualifies for “M” prefixes. A lot of them were hourly but a handful were high frequency (IIRC the M10/M11 were every Ten minutes combined taking in the back streets behind Park Hill flats, the M26/M27 were a combined eight minutes, taking in the Council estates of Wybourn/ Manor Park, penetrating them better than ‘big buses’ on routes like the 56 managed, the M47/M48 were about every ten minutes, similar to the double decker 47/48 but serving the back streets of Shiregreen rather than the main loop)
Later though, when SYT embraced the Eager Beaver brand for frequent minibus services running along “main” roads (13/ 14/ 33/ 52/ 89/ 92 etc - note, no prefixes), the “M” routes were generally just hourly, often PTE subsidised, they started to be merged together or ‘rationalised’.
Funny that some cities had high frequency minibuses in 1986 (e.g. the C5 in Edinburgh running every five minutes) but South Yorkshire took a long time to properly trust frequent services to minibuses
Longer standing examples included the M67 (Darnall - Littledale Estate - direct along the Parkway - City - University - backstreets of Crookes/ Walkley - Hillsborough - backstreets of Warncliffe etc - Stocksbridge - some of of the unique links provided by the M67 became frequent commercial services, e.g. First/Stagecoach ran a 52 every four minutes from the city centre - Uni - Crookes - Hillsborough, Littledale Estate gained a twenty minute bus into town with the 6, albeit via a much slower route (Both of these have been significantly cut back since then)
The M67 was renumbered 201 around the millennium, when the PTE seemed to grow out of “prefix” routes - though oddly the M17 remained the M17 - the 201 running from the city centre to Hillsborough as described then via the Stocksbridge bypass to Chapletown/ Northern General Hospital/ Meadowhall. The Stocksbridge - Chapletown bit survives (recently taken on by Stagecoach when Powells abandoned ship).
Other bits of M67 that still exist are posts of the Hillsborough- Warncliffe route served by the 58, which Stagecoach subcontracted to South Pennine due to lack of drivers) and the Langsett Estate bit of First’s 135, which was a tough drive up a twisting hill negotiating parked cars when the M67 was a minibus but even messier on the B7RLEs that the 135 drivers have to do it in, nightmare!
Other “M” routes worth a mention were the M60 (which had a branded bus despite just being an hourly variation of the 60 - diverting at Endcliffe and extending to Lodge Moor).., the M23 (the Skye Edge section survived as part of the 10 until Powells abandoned Sheffield, the Broomhall part was only ever a stones throw from main road services but survived for many a year), the M92 (the hourly minibuses was the last evidence of the twenty minute cross city Sheffield &District 91/94/98 from Handsworth to Chapletown, now just the 92, no prefix, intertworked with the 58 mentioned above)
The last “new” M services I can recall were the M85/M86, around 1997, when Mainline were losing the Middlewood market to Supertram, so the 85/86 were converted to minibuses and extended to the bottom end of Winn Gardens (with “M” prefixes to highlight the extension); it wasn’t enough to save the services though, the Middlewood route had seen double deckers terminating every five minutes in the 1980s but once the trams came there was no market for a dedicated bus service
I guess that the reason for the “seventeen” bit of the M17 was because the route from Totley Brook into the City Centre was the 17 until the late 1980s, when the 17/24 provided a frequent service from Abbeydale Road to Attercliffe (before the 24 went straight on to Brinsworth/ Rotherham and the 17 took a tour of northern Sheffield’s council estates before terminating at Hillsborough). The changes of the late 1980s saw the 97/97a (later 98) becoming the Totley/ Totley Brook - Abbeydale Road - City service, but the M17 remained unnumbered, even as the 17 shrivelled up, running City - Hillsborough, then City - Fox Hill, then Meadowhall- Hillsborough, then replaced by other routes
(Unless the M17 was a top secret service for spies? That might explain why it kept going as other routes were withdrawn?)