Upgrading the Mainline

As we've bumped along during the summer, we are almost at September and with it the final piece of the jigsaw with our mainline service, the 15 which runs between Wellington, Taunton, Bridgwater and Burnham on Sea. 

In some respects the route mirrors the original WebberBus commercial bus service launched in 2007 that saw them diversify into providing local bus services. Originally that service ran between Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton and Bridgwater before extensions to the service saw it go to Highbridge and Burnham on Sea, and later still, Wellington and Rockwell Green. 

The county's main hospital wasn't linked by a through bus, you had to get the 21 and change buses in the Town Centre, so the route offered a link that didn't exist.

This arrival managed to wind up First to the point they retaliated, though their retaliation merely served to encourage WebberBus to expand onto another service, the 28 which they operated as an 18 in 2009. Their route was targeted at locals, also serving Musgrove Park Hospital on it's way in and out of Taunton rather than those visiting Butlins who'd use the service at the expense of the locals and it built up a following. 

At the start, Webberbus attempted not to run in front of First's services, but the traditional response from First included registering revised timetables which placed their buses 5 minutes in front of Webber ones. The response after a while went from being polite to 'stuff them then, we'll change ours'....!

There are very few commercially profitable services in Somerset, but all three of them radiate from Taunton. The corridor between Taunton & Wellington, Taunton to Bridgwater and Burnham on Sea and Taunton to Minehead. The latter has Dr Beeching to thank for it's popularity, as he closed the parallel branch railway line in 1970...

As you can see, the 15 therefore links up two of the commercially profitable services in the county. We began 'our' service in Autumn 2010 using Optare Solos and our view was that it was a traffic skimming service so, a half full 29 seater bus was fine for our route costings. The original timetable ran hourly, with an alternate working on the half hour which took a different route out of Taunton, via Creech St Michael to Monkton Heathfield and onto Bridgwater. This mirrored the Webberbus timetable with a couple of important differences, we provided an evening and Sunday service as part of the operations. 

There are sound commercial reasons for doing so. A service that operates throughout the day, not just when the bulk of the customers are around, encourages people to use the service and eliminates the need for people to use other modes of transport instead. Once you have that other mode of transport, such as a car or a taxi you're going to make more use of it. So you won't buy a season ticket for the bus service as you won't use it all the time.

The costs of providing such peripheral services, in my view, are marginal given the standing costs of the vehicle have been met from the normal weekday patterns of service. You are only in for the costs of the driver, the fuel, and the wear and tear on the vehicle. 

It only requires a fraction of the weekday peak vehicle requirement, and provided you take a long term view, you do end up with more people using the service.  

During 2011, we revisited the timetable we provided on the 15 and took the same view as Webberbus. That essentially is what we operate today - a 30 minute frequency across a single line of route, with evening and Sunday services on a lower frequency. A Summer timetable on Sundays is also provided where the daytime frequency is 30 minutes reflecting that people might like to visit the seaside, and during winter months that reduces to hourly. The basic weekday timetable needs 7 buses to operate it.

When we 'won' the bus war in 2012 we increased the frequency to 20 minutes and it ran like this for a couple of years, until the Autumn of 2014 when construction work began on Hinkley C. The timetable was truncated to run Musgrove Park Hospital - Burnham on Sea only and with some vicious pruning of the running times, was achieveable with 5 buses. 

However, the entire line of route has some horrendous traffic congestion which only gets worse each passing year, so that proved unreliable. A restoration to a 7 bus PVR in October 2015 and extension to Wellington gives us the current timetable which continues in operation to this day. 

Being our 'killer' route, it's one where we've continually tried to put the best and newest buses on. The Optare Solos gave way to large single decks, such as Mercedes Citaros and Scania's, before a batch of 6 brand new Citaros came in 2013. These were added to with some Wright bodied Volvo B7RLEs, and then some Wright Gemini bodied Volvo B9TLs built for Wright stock in 2014. 

There is however one problem with operating double deck buses on the 15. That is the 13'9' rail bridge at Taunton Rail Station. It is possible to get a 14'6' vehicle under it, part of the way, but you become wedged and you cause a lot of disruption and paperwork. That never used to be a problem when lots of 13'6' Bristol VRTs and Leyland Olympians were commonplace in Southern National land, but more modern low floor double decks come from London where the standard height is 14' 6'

A slightly off route 21 from First....... (c) Somerset County Gazette

Illustrating the problem of former London buses being highbridge is this example (c) Somerset Live

That isn't an issue for the First 21, as it goes out of Taunton via East Reach, Hamilton Road, Creech Castle and Bathpool before reaching Monkton Heathfield.Assuming the driver doesn't go offroute of course as we've shown in picture 1. 

So, with the 2015 timetable we introduced a double deck working, the 15X which operates two round trips during the peak hours slotted in between normal timings. This was a one bus, one driver working on a split shift. 

Over time, we've had a fleet of Volvo B8RLEs, with Wright bodies, which proved to be so troublesome they were disposed of after 18 months, and since then we've operated older Mercedes Citaros, Volvo B10BLEs alongside a smaller number of B7RLEs and B8RLEs before settling, in Autumn 2020 on a fleet of Volvo B10BLEs. 

The problem with large single deckers in the southwestbus operation is their length. Much of our bus network is rural, and involves running down narrow, twisty country lanes. 12m buses aren't best suited to that sort of road and so we only want vehicles as long as a low floor Dart (just over 9metres). New Darts aren't available as a diecast model now. 

So, for our mainline route, we've decided to bite the bullet and get in a fleet of new ADL Enviro 400

The pre production Enviro 400 MMC as seen in 2014.... rather nice

MMCs. These are a vehicle which has impressed ever since I met the prototype back in 2014. 

It is an evolution of the Enviro 400, which suffered from iffy build quality (especially when built down to a price for the big bus groups). ADL has gone after Wright customers ( how to set fire to a loyal customer is really a story for another time) and been quite successful in doing so. When I went to Yellows the second time, we received 6 brand new MMCs in 2017 which, to date, are the last new deliveries of buses they've had. All worked pretty much out of the box when they arrived.

Our first fleet examples of the MMC arrived in Autumn 2018, and were the first release to come out in single door form. They carried a hybrid livery with large Southwestbus fleetnames on the tween decks panels just to let everyone know this lovely new things were OURS...

The closest we'll get to waving phallic things.The middle bus was a triaxle 102 seater.

We have a dual use in mind for our MMCs - the advent of PSVAR means we need to use accessible vehicles on railway work. So, normal weekday work on our mainline service can be added to with weekend railway replacement work and with it, the business case for a fleet of brand new double deck buses becomes justifiable.

The original pair of MMCs have now been repainted into a common livery, and fitted with coach seating for use on the 15. Three more will be entering service on September 1st, on 71 plates to complete the upgrade of our mainline service. 

How things will look, from September 1st.