Why Model Buses?

 

Now that I've explained a little about me, I thought we would explore my interests in model buses and fleet operation.

When I was 9, in 1992 my birthday present was one of the EFE 'grey box' AEC RT buses. Dad bought it from a model shop, no doubt with money he didn't have. Being obsessed with buses I had very few toy ones until I entered the world of work delivering newspapers. Even then purchases weren't as numerous as later on in life. 

I didn't have a games console, or a model train set, or a racing track so in my early teens I started my first model bus 'fleet'. Blue Bus began in November 1997 using a Corgi Juniors Mercedes 'minibus' which resembled a 608 but wasn't in practice. But as a representation of a commercially available at the time bus it did the job.

This Mercedes operated an interlinked network of traditional out and back 'Market day' type shopping services based on my native home of Yeovil. I assumed just to the north there was a dormitory town and this featured largely in the early days of the network. 

Further toys arrived, mainly Matchbox Leyland Titans and Ikarus coaches which with the aid of some blu tack and some white paper became Bova Futura coaches. There were also a pair of reworked chinese copy Leyland Olympians which were based on the Lledo casting. Scale wasn't deemed important obviously. 

The fleet expanded east into Hampshire and probably had around 15 vehicles of different sizes. This first operation was 'sold on paper' around July 1998 to a large uk bus grouping. Around a year later the Blue Bus name was revived and it's focus of operation altered to one centred around the nighttime economy and ad hoc contract work before moving to North Dorset early in 2000.

Later in 1998 the first 'proper' models entered the fleet courtesy of my Christmas tips from the paper round. Bought on 'clearance' from a model shop in Weymouth were a Corgi OOC Dennis Dart, and an EFE Reeve Burgess bodied Mercedes minibus. Whilst the Dart has been sold twice, and repurchased twice the Mercedes has gone 22 and a bit years here. 

After leaving school I went to college to study Travel & Tourism and part of the course involved a residential trip. This was to be my first taste of 'abroad' and we went to France on board a Bova Futura coach as old as we were. The world of coaches was a little bit alien up until that point. Obviously I understood the day work side of coaches, private hires, in between schools contract jobs and the like but until that trip I'd never been on an extended tour. This rather opened up the world for me. 

A couple of months after that the first proper coach arrived - a Stagecoach Volvo B10M/Van Hool Alizee. The photo below is of the second example I bought in 2003, the first was traded in against a new Bova Futura once OOC brought that casting out.  

This ran alone for a few months before the arrival in September 2000 of the Speedlink coach, ostensibly a DAF. The DAF was only '4' years old on paper so was an expensive topline coach which spent most of it's time abroad. The Bova Futura was a new release of the Paul Winson coach but whilst it was a perfect model, it had poseable wheels which I remain not keen on to this day. Subsequent arrivals for the coach fleet were Van Hool Alizee's though the EFE Plaxton Paramount was also a popular purchase.

None of these early arrivals were repainted - typically buses would run in as acquired liveries and I'd not yet discovered means of removing the fleetnames, so these would be covered over. There aren't many photos from these early days but I have some from September 2003 which Dad took on my Minolta X300 film camera with the benefit of zoom lenses. We both had X300s, and unhelpfully after his passing away in 2018 those lenses disappeared thanks to little brother... :(

There were other cheap arrivals from the local model shop having a clearance sale with a number sold off at £5 each. Two more  H registered Mercedes 709s, a Beeline Mk1 Leyland Lynx and later on a Fylde DAF/Optare Delta.

From a young age I've always been interested in timetables and have spent large parts of my career creating them. In some ways I describe myself as a frustrated managing director so my model fleet fills the breach and provides me with a creative outlet. 

The middle of 2001 saw me undertake a two week work experience placement with Dorset County Council, and it was after this that the model fleet began operating it's first daily bus services. Unhelpfully I'd sold off the two H reg Mercedes minibuses, the Delta and the Lynx so another 709 arrived from the same model shop in Weymouth. This was in tomato soup orange and was an M reg example.

In hindsight the opportunities to use those buses were there and I could have built up a solid base of schools contracts and market day services a year earlier without selling off the earlier buses and coaches. 

Even today, most MBF fleet operators don't operate school contract work and private coach hire. There are however a lot of fleets running local bus services and express coach services. I guess it's the rural nature of where I grew up that meant I didn't want to be confined to one type of operation - the real fleets mixed bus and coach operation, often running coaches on bus services, using them for day excursions, school contracts and private hires outside of those times.

By the time I'd left home in 2003 to go to University Blue Bus was running around 20 buses and coaches, but predominantly was a bus operation. Vehicle workings were self contained running all day, so buses had fixed routes and there wasn't a great deal of infill work for contract vehicles. 

It was only after I sold Blue Bus in 2008 and went into scheduling real buses did I learn about the various tricks to squeeze vehicle requirements whilst maintaining frequencies- maximising the work a vehicle could do. Stagecoach were and still are highly efficient users of drivers and vehicles and will work their vehicles quite hard with buses out for 19/20 hours a day in some instances with minimal turnaround times. 

Leaving home was the time Blue Bus quadrupled in size by expanding the bus service side of the operation and there were around 80 vehicles by the time I graduated from university in 2006. Much of those services were organically grown - devised with a clean sheet of paper and many new links were opened up. In the following two years the fleet doubled in size again by expanding onto traditionally established services, i.e those operated in the real world by real operators but this met with resistance from other fleets and ultimately the operation passed to a new owner who has continued it in much the same way as I had done. 

Southwestbus is a somewhat different animal to my first fleet in that it operates a number of services which exist in reality. I met my long suffering other half in 2010 and she hails from Bridgwater. At the time the fleet was called Southbus, having originally began in East Kent where I lived at the time and bordering East Sussex (Hastings where I also have family connections) Bridgwater at the time was served by another MBF fleet operator and it was one of those I'd had 'resistance' with when running Blue Bus. 

A lot of the disagreements were down to misinterpretation and misunderstanding (on both sides) so the relations were somewhat frosty. Later on I got to know this gentleman very well and happily things are much more positive these days- to the point vehicles have been bought and sold between ourselves on more than one occasion. 

Southbus was in effect a 'skimming' operation where we operated a select number of bus services and we operated those services to a full timetable. So, not just a normal 6 day a week daytime only timetable, there were evening and Sunday services on a number of the routes as well. I've always felt strongly that the bus industry needs to offer a complete service, rather than one where it just runs at the busiest times. 

Alongside that there were a number of school, and college, contract services. So there were alternate streams of revenue in place and we're not, even now, dependent upon just one stream of revenue.