Campaigners are urging residents to get back on the buses after their rural bus route was granted a temporary reprieve.

Travellers in Norwood Green are celebrating after learning the number 226 bus is to be reinstated after two years out of service.

Now campaigners are warning people to use the service - or run the risk of losing it again if a trial run beginning on February 1 proves unpopular.

Councillor Keith Butterick (Lab, Hipperholme and Lightcliffe) said: "I would encourage people to use the service as much as possible to make sure it's a success.

"The volume of traffic is a major problem these days and any initiative which helps people get back on the buses has got to be welcomed."

Coun Butterick said the reinstatement of the service was the culmination of a two-year campaign by residents, who had got up several petitions demanding the return of the bus route.

Now the 226, which runs between Halifax and Leeds, will be re-routed through the village to pick up passengers 12 times a day from Mondays to Saturdays.

Campaigner Nigel Trenholme, chairman of the Norwood Green Residents' Association, said: "We are very pleased the service has been reinstated, it will allow the pensioners to get out and about more."

A spokesman for the West Yorkshire Passenger Transport Authority said the 226 service was stopped two years ago because a lack of demand from the public had made it uneconomical.

But now, using part of a £500,000 windfall from the Government under the Rural Transport Grant, the service will be one of 22 schemes to go ahead throughout the West Yorkshire district between now and September.

A WYPTA spokesman said: "We're in the process of producing a leaflet and a copy of the timetable of the 226 which will be sent to all residents and which will explain that the service will be on an experimental basis.

"The bus service will be monitored to make sure we're channelling the right amount of money into a valued service."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.