Many moons ago (1983 to be exact), I wrote a program on the BBC B in 6502 assembler which would allow people to not only find the route and times of a service, but also gave the fares. This program was around 12K in size (it had to be small as the BBC only had 31K available in Mode 7) and the data was held on a single double sided 5 1/4" floppy. As you can imagine though, to store such a large amount of data and do such things, the data had to be heavily compressed and more than that, as it was copyrighted, needed to be encrypted. I still have the program and the notes for the data, but the encryption decoder has long since died, so I have all of the Merseyside timetables, but it's completely unusable. Let's start this though at the beginning... IN THE BEGINNING Well before the privatisation of buses, Merseyside had a public transport system that worked together instead of competing against itself so that punters had a service that could (more-or-less) be relie