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I was curious why the route to Kidderminster was mentioned as "increased", thought it was hourly. Turned out I was wrong.
Is the current service still a reduced thing for plague purposes or has it been 2 hourly for a while?

Yup, it was a pandemic reduction, it was cut back to 2 hourly during the initial lockdowns of the Covid situation.

Improvements to some Kidderminster and Redditch garage services from 29th August:

https://www.diamondbuses.com/news/worcestershire-service-changes-august-21/?fbclid=IwAR24V4T3lmb4knzEUpajtKu1SDZn6QtntDRoYijfLFy9auG61-JkFdyBNqE

Launch of the first bus at Centenary Square outside the library today:

https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/news/article/932/birmingham_gets_first_hydrogen_bus

Central connect used to run the 192 Birmingham- Kidderminster and the 123 Merry Hill- Perry Barr. And can I remind you that the 417 now 4H was a ludlows route that got taken over when diamond took over. Nx are the ones that have jumped to compete on the 4H. Do we need nx on the 4H? @j789

Well, the 123 and 192 were both tenders so there was no innovation there, they just won the contracts from Centro and Worcestershire respectively.

One of the Diamonds that has been operating on the 192 service both yesterday and today (either 20882 or 30051 I think?) has got a faulty front destination display. It isn't displaying anything except for some garbage on the left side of the display, and there are no paper replacement blinds in the front window from what I can see.

Sadly, quite typical of the Kidderminster allocation. As well as the Solo in question which I have seen for a couple of days running there is also one of the 125 branded Streetlites running around with no front destination blind at the moment.

I thought that Partnership was meant to be the way of the future under the Governments bus proposals recently announced. Far better for operators to do it on a voluntary basis rather than be forced into joint timetabling or similar?

The offices may be at/moving to Digbeth Coach Station?
As the name on the side of the bus has changed to Digbeth as well.

Yes, the Bus division offices have gone to National Express House which is the new name for the office part of the Coach Station site,

Just seen Midland Red C1 coach 3301 (KHA 301) being driven through Kidderminster.

Looks like it has had a very thorough repanelling job done, being totally in bare metal/silver.

Lots of pictures on social media of the snow hill lines being completely packed. Trains undergoing repairs aren't helping

Yeah, travelled yesterday into Birmingham in the afternoon, came back early evening. Two carriage train both ways, standing passengers on the train in, no chance of Social Distancing.

This is the new service I think:

https://www.bromsgroveadvertiser.co.uk/news/19169379.on-demand-public-transport-service-launch-bromsgrove/

Despite the article indicating that the service would launch in April, I don't think it has, unless it's been a very low-key launch!

  I notice this bus times (fleet) list  is showing an assortment of route
numbers preceded by the letters  N D K H and W  I cant see what the letters
  are there for  can someone explain?  thanks

Reference letters indicate the area the service is in to prevent confusion due to duplicated service numbers:
N = Wolverhampton
D = Dudley
K = Kingswinford
H = West Bromwich
W = Walsall
also C for Coventry

This is only applying to Nx isn't it?

Anything on the TfWm stuff as well?

Yes only NX as they are using the funding given to them by the Government under the Job Retention Scheme to do this.

As it's a Warwickshire CC contract I would have thought that it's up to the Council to decide to include it in the service specification.

I have a random question when Cleveland rd was operational in the late 80s etc was Park Lane in existence as they are/ were  both pretty big depots?..

Pretty sure that it was like this:

Park Lane originally shut totally  in 1986 and only CR was in operation. PL then reopened as an Engineering base in 1991 but CR was still used as the actual garage.

In 1993 CR closed and PL became the operating garage for Wolverhampton.

Totally different to Dundee. Dundee was isolated from the rest of the NX Bus network so economies of scale could not be bought into force and there are different local authorities and government rules applying up there. McGills could also purchase it with no issues about lessoning competition.

Coventry by contrast is obviously close to the rest of the network with the same Transport Authority and government. Plus Stagecoach would not be able to buy Coventry I would have thought without competition issues being raised.