Following from the closure of the Yellow Buses network last week, things have been moving at some pace with regards to replacements and the dismantling of the Yellow Buses and Coaches operation. Some of the Bournemouth Corporation has been saved, and morebus have also made more announcements about services in and around the town.
If you missed the original announcements about Yellow Buses, they should appear in the Yellow Buses category right here on Hants Bus Blog.
Buster’s Beach Bus returns (in all but name)
morebus have announced that they will be running an open top service across the former Yellow Buses route 12 between Alum Chine and Hengistbury Head. The route appears to be the same as the old Buster’s Beach Bus, so it appears to be a straight replacement.
The service is apparently planned to run with two open-top buses, providing eight round trips a day.
Yellow Coaches
Most of the Yellow Coaches operation, including the Megabus coach service to London, have been sold to Eastleigh based Xelabus.
Now… there was an early reference to Yellow Coaches and the Bournemouth Golden Tours open top bus service which continued to be advertised on the Yellow Coaches (“Part of XelaGroup” website).
The thing is, it disappeared.
Reference to the Bournemouth Tour has also been removed from the Golden Tours website. This can only suggest that either Xela did not want, or Golden Tours did not contract. If you see Golden Tours still running around Bournemouth, let us know in the comments below.
Schools and Bus Times
Two new sections to the website have appeared.
It was originally announced by Xelabus that they want to continue offering high quality tenders and school services in Bournemouth. It would not surprise me if retaining the schools network that Yellow Coaches run – did Coaches sub-contract the schools that Buses ran to them? – and Xelabus do have a history of running school buses.
The inclusion of Bus Time does indicate that they are looking at running at least a few tendered bus services in the area. A few comments on my original post suggest that XelaGroup have started looking at some of the BCP tendered services Yellow were previously running.
This does tie in with morebus removing services 18, 33 and 36 from their planners from next week. Credit where it is due, I would imagine GoAhead said “we can run this while you decide what to do, BCP.”
… and are XelaYellow hiring?
As you can see, Yellow Coaches “Xela-edition” are already hiring for bus drivers in the Bournemouth area.
Included in the advert is reciprocal travel arrangements with First, GoAhead and on their own Yellow Buses.
I know – it looks like they simply have not audited the website they bought along with the company.
The Coaches bit of Buses
National Express have also bought part of the Bournemouth Corporation Ltd (Yellow Buses) operation with managed their contract for coaches between Dorset and London.
To confuse things; the National Express coach contract was with the company running as Yellow Buses, not the company running as Yellow Coaches. This part of the operation, along with the engineering operations of Yellow Buses.
Of course, when you have two separate corporate entities running with a unified brand, it can get confusing. This include of course when we talk about the schools services above… who is running what and sub-contract what to who!
… and finally…
What appears to be good business all around; morebus did sign a massive number of Yellow Bus drivers to GoAhead in just a matter of days in preparation for the launch of the commercial ex-Yellow Buses network. There was a short term offer of a £3,000 sign on bonus for Yellow Buses drivers moving across, albeit I have no further information about whether there was any strings or commitment requirements.
For those drivers though, I would imagine it is sigh of relief that when you suddenly find yourself without a job, that you have a professional and skilful role open up to you.
Travelling by bus during the heatwave has to be the most unpleasant of experiences i`ve encountered in recent times.There are so few windows to open and unlike the trains,a great lack of air conditioning.I can`t believe that in 2022,a bus seems to be a no go zone in hot weather.