Manual / The timetable

The +1 clock, and why a bus departs at 25:10

A last bus that leaves at ten past one in the morning belongs to the previous day's service, and every timetable in the country writes that departure as 25:10. This app never prints 25:10. It prints 01:10+1 — the real clock time, with a marker saying the departure falls after midnight but belongs to the day before.

This page is what that marker means, where the day actually turns over, and how to tell at half past one in the morning which day's service you are reading.

What you are looking at

01:10+1 is one time, in two parts.

Both halves matter, and neither survives on its own. 25:10 is a time nobody reads off a clock; a bare 01:10 is a statement about the wrong day, which is the version that puts somebody at a terminus twenty-four hours out.

On a printed diversion document the marker has a space in front of it — a window reads 22:00–02:00 +1 — because there it is set in running prose rather than in a table cell. It is the same marker.

Why the timetable counts past 24:00

A bus service day is not a calendar day. It starts before dawn and it finishes when the last bus is in, which on a Friday or Saturday night is well after midnight — and everything from that night belongs, operationally, to the day it started on. The roster page is one driver's day. The block is one bus's day. The timetable is the day's service.

So a timetable counts hours from the start of its day and keeps counting: 23:40, 24:15, 25:10. There is no 25th hour on a clock, but there is a 25th hour in a service day, and it is the hour after midnight.

This is why the app splits the two apart rather than choosing between them. It shows the clock time everyone can act on, and it keeps the day the departure belongs to.

The service day turns over at about 03:00

Not at midnight. Between midnight and roughly three in the morning, "today" in this app is still yesterday's service. That is deliberate: three o'clock is past the last scheduled after-midnight service, so the day rolls over when the night's tail is in rather than in the middle of it.

The consequence is the one worth carrying:

So a Sunday-morning question splits in two, and the answer depends on which side of three o'clock you are asking from. At 01:30 the running buses are Saturday's, they are on Saturday's timetable, and their times carry +1. At 04:00 they are Sunday's, on Sunday's timetable, with no marker at all.

If you want the other one, set the date yourself. In the Timetable tab, switch to Schedule and pick the date on the Date control. Picking Sunday at 01:30 gives you Sunday's service — starting at five in the morning, three and a half hours away — which is exactly right and is usually not the question.

Where you meet the marker

• The Timetable tab. In the Table view, both the run's start time down the left and its departure from each stop. In the Schedule clock and the Window readout. A route running past midnight has its last few rows marked.
• A stop's departures, on the Map Explorer's stop card: a small +1 beside the clock time.
• Operations Analysis: sign-on and sign-off times, the start and end of every leg of a shift or a bus's day, and the time a handoff happens. A late-turn shift signing off at 01:40+1 signed on the previous afternoon. Lengths — worked time, spread, a turnaround's buffer — never carry the marker, because they are durations rather than times of day.
• The printed diversion documents, with the leading space described above.

The clock format setting

⚙ Settings → Appearance → Clock offers 24-hour (14:35) and 12-hour (2:35 pm). In 12-hour the same departure reads 1:10 am+1, and the setting's own help line says as much: "Service times past midnight keep their +1 day marker in both formats."

The +1 survives the change, and that is not an oversight. Dropping it would leave 1:10 am, which is a different and wrong statement about which day a driver is being told to be somewhere.

What it does not mean

+1 does not mean the bus is a day late. It has nothing to do with lateness, delay or performance. It is a calendar marker on a scheduled time.

+1 does not mean "tomorrow's timetable". It is this service day's bus. Tomorrow's timetable is a different date with its own runs, and none of them carries the marker at its start.

25:10 is not an error, and it is not a 25-hour clock. It is how the published timetable writes the same departure. If you see it in a source document beside this app's 01:10+1, they agree.

The 03:00 turnover is not a rule about everything on screen. It governs the service day — the timetable, the roster, the schedule views. A road incident that starts at one in the morning is stamped with the calendar date it happened on, because that is what the road authority means, and it would be wrong to report it against the previous day.

"Today" before three in the morning is yesterday's date, and that is correct. If the Date control reads yesterday at 01:30, nothing is broken — you are being shown the service that is actually running. Setting it forward to the calendar date shows a service that has not started.

The clock format changes only what is printed. Switching to 12-hour does not change what a shared link carries, and the person you send it to sees the times in whichever format they have chosen.