School Buses Start to Stop

Following on from the impending closure of the Yellow Coaches operation in Bournemouth (albeit not the closure of Yellow Coaches Ltd) there have been some updates of late.

I was quite keen for Yellow Coaches and/or XelaGroup to actually tell the public that they were going to lose their service. Enthusiasts you see, knew about this what feels like a world of time ago, but no-one apart from yours truly and some die-hard peeved off “customer comes first” commentators were saying anything.

So I was glad to see that Yellow Coaches (here – on the buried News page – another bugbear) and Xelabus (here) (who apparently have nothing to do with Yellow Coaches) (despite sharing the same contact number) (lots of brackets) have both announced publicly of the impending closure about a week ago.

Unless…

Well unless you are a parent of some of the schools who have been told their Yellow, Green or other buses stopped last weekend. Lytchett Minster School, Parkstone Grammar School and Cranborne School lost their XelaService on Friday 13th; certainly I understand Lytchett Minster is now a Damory service and Cranborne is now served by Burrows Coaches, with a bus acquired from ‘Oop Norf:

Also, Reach South Academy Trust will become a National Express Transport Solutions service from Monday 23rd, word is that Highcliffe School ceases to be a Yellow Coaches service imminently and….

Other schools have parents paying for a years season ticket in advance, which I would be insanely worried about at the moment and one can only hope that in the coming months that St Peters’ School parents don’t suddenly find that they become unsecured creditors.

Communication is a problem

I have always said that communication with XelaGroup has been – strained.

Live tracking of its services is at best reliant on a bespoke app which as far as I can tell requires you to register your phone number to access. Certainly the Rygo app that is in the Google Play Store gives me the impression that it was designed for companies to get their drivers logged in. I have never understood why supplying Bus Open Data Service uploads was never implemented, even the single bus operator Southampton Mini Link managed it.

Communication via social media has equally been haphazard. I know, I have been muted by the social media team at XelaGroup and I gave up asking for information a long time ago. Questions from others either get ignored, or simply told to phone the Xelabus office.

Apart from a single post about flooding near their Bournemouth Airport outstation, very little gets said about service shortages in the Bournemouth & Poole area (probably why there are no public facing trackers) and it took a local BCP Council Candidate to tell the locals:

But Heritage Services are Free on 18th February

Although their heritage Northern Counties PD3 (BUF 272C) has been up for sale on ebay – and no-one entered a bid on the £10,500 opening price – a comment on the Southampton Bus Update blog suggested that Xelabus are recreating some routes to commemorate the end of First Southampton / Southampton City Bus.

The free-to-use bus will apparently stop on request at any point on the routes they cover and a full timetable has now appeared on the Xelabus website. The Southampton & District Transport Heritage Trust are doing similar on the following day, but with an agreed stipulation that buses will not pick up or drop off anywhere but Pound Tree Road.

…. and finally

You know why some of this new post appears to be written in the past tense? It’s because every time I go to finish it off, one of the five different contacts of information I have received since the original smoke started rising over Bournemouth Airport (although the Yellow Coaches website still has a postal address of Yeomans Way), has offered something new.

Now, you know me, I try really hard not to get threatened with legal action, so I won’t mention [redacted] this week, nor the fact that the [redacted] might already be in line to be [redacted].

I have the feeling that I might be posting more about Yellow Coaches over the weekend though.