Photo of the Week - Week 24:
Former Harristown RV630 is seen operating Route 270 at the Dunboyne Terminus of Route 270 on the 14th October 2012.
Route 270 was introduced on the 18th Spetember 2000. It was well overdue. The estate of Littlepace/Castaheany had grown at a spectacular rate in the late 90s. Save for a few 70Xs, and 70As that came in during the peak periods there was no other service in the estate. It should also be noted that it was a number of years before these phantom 70As (or 70s via Littlepace) actually made a timetable and were given the 70A designation. Before this they were untimetabled and therefore liable to not showing at all. If you lived in Littlepace there was a reasonably short distance to the 70 at the Clonee N3 Interchange. If you lived at the opposite end in Bramblefield, there was a short walk to Harstown and the long and windy Route 39 to the City.
To be fair to Dublin Bus, serving the Littlepace Estate was not easy. The estate, when almost complete, only had one exit at the Clonee N3 interchange. This was onto a roundabout, which caused incredible delays. It was a number of years before this was replaced with traffic lights and thus those buses that did enter the estate were always subject to incredible delays. The concept of the 270 was to link the estate with the Shopping Centre and then provide further capacity between Dunboyne and Blanchardstown Centre. It is by far the busiest of the Blanchardstown locals, being almost instantaneously so, and it says a lot about the route that it had no changes in routing/frequency when the Network Direct review of the Blanchardstown services occured in October 2010. It was then that the 70 finally joined the 270 serving Littlepace estate and the timetable has been nicely interlaced along their combined sections. The routing of the 270 is:
Blanchardstown Shopping Centre (West), Blanchardstown Road South, N3 (returning via Mulhuddart Village), Clonee N3 Interchange, Littlepace Road (turning around at Bramblefield roudabout), Clonee N3 Interchange, Clonee Main Street, Station Road, Dublin Road, Main Street Dunboyne (terminating at Church).
The original terminus at Blanchardstown Shopping Centre was outside The Plex with the 237-239 up until November 2006 when it was moved to the west of the centre.
RV574 is seen during the very last days of Harristown RVs operating Route 270 on Littlepace Road on the 3rd November 2012.