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...

The following is 'in the queue' for an MBF Journal having been sent in last year in order to provide some material. It details the building process for a plastic kit from getting the box to having a completed model.  Enjoy!  Back in 2018, Peco Models brought two plastic bus kits back to the market after a long absence. The former Tower Models Leyland National and Leyland Olympian models came out in a different range of liveries and are still available from a number of different stockists, for less than £10. Older members of the MBF will no doubt recall the Tower models and will have built up numerous examples of them. As one of the younger members of the MBF, I would have been 6/7 when these kits were commonly available and my building skills at that age wouldn't have been sufficiently good to have completed a model, so these passed me by.  My late Father acquired one of the National kits in 1993, with the intention of modelling a Southern National bus at his depot. L...

Now that some 'long term' financial issues have been resolved (with personal MS Money files) southwestbus will shortly be beginning the shopping for new buses and coaches. The coaches are part of a long term strategy to reinvest in the coach fleet and ensure decent equipment for some of our customers. So, 10 Irizar i6's on Scania chassis will shortly be on their way to cider country. Alongside this, we are also going to get two more 'corporate' spec coaches for two important customers sole use.  There's also some more ADL Enviro 400 MMC's and a pair of Optare Solo SRs expected during the summer.  More next time, I was mindful of needing to put something up given a month has passed. Must try harder to put posts up here.

For the last 14 months, or so, we've been having to contend with the effects of a worldwide pandemic. This has manifested itself in the real bus/coach industry in differing ways.  Coaches have been utterly decimated by a collapse of private hire work, tour work and all the 'in between' jobs that come a coach operator's way alongside traditional school contract work. All the while, the outgoings remain the same. Coaches are expensive items of equipment and usually are on finance, so that bill is paid whether or not the vehicle moves.  I have seen these effects as a coach driver and for the last 14 months, my work has been in the home to school category, after a 6 month hiatus from mid March 2020 when the schools closed.  That was complicated by a house move to Yorkshire, so it allowed me time to reflect on what I want from life, added with the benefit of loads of free time, but no funds with which to do things.   The bus industry has also had it's issues during t...

  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 t...