RESIDENTS on the Rame Peninsula are becoming increasingly worried that the services provided by the familiar pink double-decker buses – which connect the villages in the area with Torpoint and Plymouth – could be stopped altogether.

The threat to the bus services – as a result of Cornwall Council and Government cutbacks – and the impact on the local community should they be lost, was brought home at a recent meeting.

Representatives of the Rame Peninsula Public Transport Users Group met three local county councillors to push home their fears and to seek support for their campaign to keep the buses.

Connecting

First Bus (Tamar Link), which operates services up to eight times a day, is able to run them commercially on the busy routes from Plymouth connecting with the ferries at Torpoint and Cremyll, and east of HMS Raleigh. But from the west of HMS Raleigh the routes have so far been 100 per cent funded by the council.

These routes take in the villages of Antony, Cawsand, Kingsand, Millbrook, Cremyll, Freathy, Crafthole and Sheviock.

Chairman of the users' group Brian Pillinger says all the bus routes are now out to tender and under renegotiation but it will be the end of January at least before it is known if the village routes have been saved or lost.

'Transport should be designated as a frontline public service like health and education,' said Mr Pullinger.

'If the 81 bus currently serving the Rame area was axed, it would leave elderly folk and residents without cars, unable to access health facilities in Torpoint and Derriford, get to work and college or go shopping. For the disabled and many pensioners a bus trip is sometimes their only means of social contact.'

The county representatives listened sympathetically to the group's complaints and agreed to meet with them again once the council's plans became clearer.