All buses on Trunk route 510 to get orange-white

All buses on the Trunk route 510 plying between Westendinasema in Espoo and Herttoniemi in eastern Helsinki will be orange-and-white by the end of September, said the City of Helsinki in a press release.

The Trunk route 510 has already gone into service on August 12. In the first weeks of service, buses on the route will bear other colours than the regular orange-and-white of trunk route buses.

Trunk route 510 will be served by 24 new buses, but not all of them were available when the route went into service, due to the fleet supplier’s production difficulties.

The route operator compensates for the fleet shortage with nine older buses, which have been in service in the region.

For example, buses on Route 510 may bear the blue-and-white colours of the customer Helsinki Region Transport HSL and the Concordia colours of Nobina.

Nobina will replace the older buses with new ones as soon as the new buses are delivered. The company estimates that all buses on Route 510 will be orange-and-white no later than the end of September.

All buses serving the route, both the new ones and the older ones, are low-floor buses with a bogie frame.

Because 510 is a trunk route, the buses on the route can be boarded through the middle doors, no matter what the colours of the particular bus are. It is not necessary to show a valid ticket to a card reader or the driver.

The older buses on the route do not have a card reader at the middle doors, so if you need to show your HSL travel card to a card reader, for example, to charge a fare, you must do so with the card reader placed at the front doors.

The trunk route network of Helsinki Region Transport (HSL) expanded with two new bus routes on 12 August, when route 58 was converted into Trunk Route 500 and Route 551 into Trunk Route 510.

The timetables and routes of the buses did not change, as they had operated with trunk-route frequencies, but the number of stops served has been reduced to speed up journey times.