I wouldn’t read too much into that. the driver trainer probably just fancied going somewhere different. I can remember back in 1990 seeing a Southend Transport driver trainer bus in Melbourne Farm Estate in Chelmsford. It was their Leyland Titan PD2 or PD3
I was going to suggest that Lynx and Sanders were the ones. They are excellent firms. BorderBus gets a bit of enthusiast love but in my limited experience, they're decent but not exceptional.
Central Connect incorporating Konnectbuses have now unveiled their new customer promise which contains among other things
Words like the above are meaningless when they do not reflect what passengers see on the ground. It's like an alternative reality.
Less PR guff please saying they provide things, time to actually start doing it
It’s a statement of what they intend to do. Given what we know of the operation and its history over the last decade, any sort of desire to improve things should be welcomed
Said story can be found here for those interested, quite a damming read:
I'm no apologist for operators but they inherited a basket case from Go Ahead. It was 9 months ago. That's no time at all especially when you're integrating operations. Given the almost total lack of investment in Go East Anglia (was it 3 new vehicles in 8 years?), I'd be curious to know exactly what people were expecting in that time?
No information on the number of other bidders - would have expected at least Arriva, First and Central Connect to have submitted tenders
Well, that is a surprise. I know #2 is very tongue in cheek. However, #1 is a very real possibility - it's been rumoured to be underpinning much of the Colchester operation. In any case, losing 4 out of a PVR of c.22/23 is a big chunk and the fleet is as bargain basement as possible.Wow so Stephensons, not who I would've put my money on. If it does go to them I wonder two things:
1. Will Arriva pull out of Colchester again.
2. Will Central Connect try and launch a commercial P&R service here too
I'd expect they'll run it from Maldon depot? I'm not certain that they'd want to buy Arriva's Colchester operation and embark in competition with First.
They do - they have a one bus working on routes 174/175, which is roughly hourly across the day.
Certainly given TMS's continued expansion too the local authorities must be getting some nice competitive prices
A very well informed source tells me that Stephensons will run the Colchester P & R from the Frating depot. There will be three Enviro 200 in P & R livery and one in fleet livery.
They received 10 Electroliners for the 8, which is interesting as they tended to allocate some of the older vehicles on there. However, as it's the major urban route through the town, it does make sense in terms of emissions in the area.
The DfT have been giving more and more funding to operators / authorities who were successful in previous ZEBRA rounds, thus First Eastern Counties (in Norfolk) has had a few rounds of funding allowing expansion of the electric fleet beyond Norwich.
