Remember Lincoln's old bus station? Here's what it looked like when it was new!
Lincoln&apos;s brand new bus station opened with triumphant fanfare at the start of this year.
It forms part of the £30m Lincoln Transport Hub which also includes a 1,000-space multi-storey park.
And many passengers are delighted to finally bid farewell to the leaking roof and pigeon droppings that were part and parcel of using the old bus station.
2018 is the 125th anniversary year of the Lincolnshire Echo and we have delved into our archives to discover that plans for the original 1970s bus station were greeted with similar enthusiasm way back when.
The City Bus Station opened in 1978 but it was bulldozed in 2016 to make way for the shiny new transport hub.
When work was about to start on the old bus station, Echo readers were told in November 1975: "An imaginative scheme, to redevelop Lincoln Thornbridge car park – including a new covered bus station – could be started early next summer.
“Although the scheme means the loss of about 450 car parking spaces, it has the benefit of removing the city buses from the congested St Mary’s Street area, which is now used as a bus terminus."
For many years, the city centre terminus for Lincoln Corporation bus services had been on the south side of St Mary’s Street.
It was all very handy for train passengers using the Central Station but with St Mary’s Street getting busier every day, sooner or later a new site had to be found for the buses.
The proposed development was a joint scheme by the Co-operative Society and the city council.
The Echo reported: “At present, the plan is for the northern part of the car park to be developed for a retail store of around 40,000 square feet and for the southern half to be a city bus station.
“One of the most striking aspects of the plan is in the way it is intended to replace the car parking lost on the Thornbridge car park.
Arthur Tindall, the then city director of estates and industrial development, was delighted with the scheme which, he forecast, could start early in the New Year 1976.
“It could take about 18 months to complete and it was possible the new bus station and store could be operating by Christmas 1977,” readers were told.
It was prompting the transportation committee to take a long, hard look at the cost of car parking in general.
And some of the figures being talked about make interesting reading from 1975.
“The main changes will be in short term car parks where the present charge is 30p a day,” the Echo story went on.