Thoughts from Southwestbus

This post will expand a little on our adventures to London. As a rural bus and coach operation, we only visit London when customers like us to go. It remains a far off place and most Somerset people visit this foreign wilderness a few times in their lives. Whereas I'm quite widely travelled and would happily hop in a coach and play chicken with the traffic in the city.  Back in 2011 we were looking at our coach operations and to our amazement noticed that no model fleet was providing a service from Wellington, Taunton and Bridgwater to London. There were services from Taunton obviously, but none from the home base of the company.  Berrys Coaches operate three services in real life under the 'superfast' banner having launched the first route at the start of coach deregulation in the early 1980s. The route ran from Wellington, Taunton, North Petherton and Bridgwater before hitting the M5 and the M4.  It ran as such for around 10 years. In 1993 they began operating the secon...

Prior to a decamp to my native home to spend time with Senior Management, the annual reshuffle of buses and coaches ready for September has taken place.  From September 85 vehicles will be needed to operate our college and schools contracts. PSVAR is an issue when it comes to the college work, as we charge separate fares and accept county tickets (Somerset County's post 16 student travel scheme) on these routes. We retain the fares revenue and the network relies on that revenue for it's commercial viability. A de-minimis payment from SCC covers some of the other operational costs of the network so it's marginally commercial from our point of view.  The schools contracts are different, in not falling under PSVAR (in our view, we're not bringing the passengers together nor do we charge separate fares, the council does) so we don't need to operate compliant stock on those contracts. Normally we'd be using older manual gearbox Volvo B10Ms on the bulk of this work, b...

After an unexpected financial windfall in June, I'm now in a happy personal position of not owing people lots of money. There are no debts to service, either, so I've been able to put some concrete into the bottom of the holes and watch it set.  It's only took me three years.  Throughout this time, the fleet has had to have investment as and when money permits. This is a situation I've been in a few times before so it is one I can operate relatively well in. It is still stressful though.  The fleet faces a number of short to medium term challenges, and those are resolved by investment in new vehicles and some secondhand purchases. We've touched on those before but there is a need to ensure we have new coaches coming in, and equally, new buses to replace the ones which are getting old and requiring more maintenance.  Although in our case, we will be able to move those buses onto lower mileage contract work such as college services. Once we've got through 2021 w...