The Days All Merged Into One

Not enough hours in the day to keep this blog maintained!

Thursday was bus shopping day! A trip to Chepstow in the morning gave me a chance to peruse some more Mercedes 709D's. N963 NAP looked promising but too small to justify its acquesition! On to Devon and another Dart has joined the fold (L718 JUD), a forty seater for the Gloucester services. It drove back from Devon without any problems whatsoever even though a 50mph journey behind it on the M5 was a little tedious. After arrival at the depot, the pleasant task of vinyl stripping began prior to sanding down and repainting. The first vinyl to go was the rear advert for a care service in Torbay that I had now read so many times! The bus was collected from Winkleigh where many First vehicles are in storage (mainly Dennis Lances and Darts). It also happens to be the site of a large vintage vehicle collection that took and hour to get round with our impromptu guided tour! The Mercedes Vario that I had gone to see had been stripped of too many parts and so I quickly walked away from it!

Friday gave me the chance to drive routes 11 and 241 again. Starting them off myself and then being joined by route learners until I left them to it. I was collected from Gloucester at 13:00 and returned to Nailsworth HQ. Just time to load the new destination software and read the instruction book before hometime! H430 EFT and H431 EFT now have working destination kits but due to an access code problem L118 HHV now does'nt! Must phone for help on Monday!

Saturday is usually a quiet day for me and today was indeed no different! A little bit of paperwork in the morning and away by lunch time!

Photo Number 4 - L889 VHT

A blast from the past! The first Mercedes 709Ds that served Cotswold Green originated from First Group. This one is illustrated fresh from repaint (27/03/2007). They were capable machines although they gave the impression that they had not been well cared for in the past and hence their replacement with ex Stagecoach vehicles. Out of the three that had been part of our fleet K693 UFV definately went to Poland where L889 VHT is rumoured to have followed and K872 NEU is rumoured to be in Kenya!

The Sun Shines On The Righteous!

A beautiful sunny day in the Cotswolds! The birds were singing, the passengers were paying and all was right with the world. Well, all but N966 NAP deciding that it was too nice a day to be working! A quick bus change and back to normal.

The new routes in Gloucester were quieter today but expected to be busy tomorrow (rumoured to be pension day!).

A trip to view a potential addition to the fleet tomorrow, having so few spare buses makes me a bit nervous!

Our route 256 comes up for re-tendering next week and appears to be suffering from the County Councils budget cuts. The Saturday journey will be discontinued although the enevitable uproar has'nt hit the local papers yet!

Photo Number 3 - H430 EFT

The superb Scanias! This photo illustartes where they come from. We now favour buying second hand from certain Stagecoach areas (Devon and East Kent are favoured at the moment) and this shows H430 EFT (13/11/2007) in Exeter coach park prior to purchase. The battery packs are not a good sign and we failed to start this one on the day despite the attentions of at least three engineering staff. A couple of days later it arrived safely in our yard.

A Tale Of Two Cities

Well one town and one city!

Todays entry will have to cover for yesterday as the miles I had driven sapped my limited reserves of energy (that and the James concert I went to last night!).

Monday began with the start of a new contract. Routes 11 and 241 in Gloucester being the next phase in the expansion of the Cotswold Green empire. The passenger numbers were surprising to say the least although with the expansion of free concessionary travel, revenue was expectedly low! Being more used to rural services, more than ten passengers on the bus at any one time is a bit alien to us! The first day went smoothly with a bit of enthiast attention. We were of course not the only company to begin former Stagecoach routes in Gloucester on Monday, Independant Coaches took over route 13.

The ticket machines have now been ordered and I look forward to shiny new Wayfarer TGX machines gracing our vehicles in the not too distant future. Much work lies ahead in converting what we do into proceedures that a computer system can understand!

Tuesday meant a morning of returning the calls I had missed on Monday and then driving the almost obligatory school bus. Routes 7 and 129 with a H430 EFT and surprisingly well behaved children! The weather is good, Ebley coaches were short of vehicles and hired F705 BAT for the afternoon and no complaints or breakdowns, how could a day be better!

Photo Number 2 - N951 NAP

Photographed near Bibury (16/04/08) after working the 09:00 service 860 from Cirencester before travelling empty to Fossebridge to commence service 864 back to Cirencester. I still fail to understand why Stagecoach would be selling these buses (even retrimmed) whilst in the area we serve they still operate older, shabbier vehicles on a daily basis! Still their loss I suppose. These vehicles, in my opinion, are a godsend to the small operator. Good on fuel and reliable, you don't get that with a Vario!

The Calm Before The Storm?

I thought it would be a bad day and it was, but only because we were so meticulous yesterday preparing for the worst, that when the worst did not happen we had too many drivers, all of the buses available and other than the dizzying heights of 'mount paperwork', nothing to do!

The chance to discuss our presence at the Stroud Bus Running Day in June provided a surprisingly pleasant interlude and so I have now decided not to decant the entire fleet from our yard to the display area but to send possibly three vehicles for display at the main site. Two scanias and a dart seem the most popular combination so far.

Another consequence of all of this free time was that the NVQ programme made some more progress today with another two completions. More NVQs scheduled for Tuesday.

Also my obsession with finding Cotswold Green referenced on the web brought me to the realisation that not all published information is correct! The Wikipedia entry that I started has the fact that we have been awarded route 13 in Gloucester (Centre to Abbeymead) but unfortunately this is not true. My other searches yielded little in the way of new information. Nobody seems to have published fleet photos for a while!

Not much else to say today!

Photo Number 1 - H843 NOC

The first of an occasional series of photos I have taken whilst at work! H843 NOC after finishing its school run near Miserden and about to run empty to Cirencester for the 1626 service 54A (31/03/08). This bus was acquired from Ebley Bus Ltd on 01/12/06 and so has been with us from the beginning. Prior to Ebley Bus Ltd this bus worked for Warrington Borough Transport. I have developed a fondness for the appearance of the Carlyle bodwork and the size of the vehicle is perfect for our operation. It is a shame that no bus currently on the market can replace these in terms of size and capacity!

An Inspector Calls

The phone rings at 06:30. That is never a good start to the day! It can only mean that we are at least two drivers short today. A short conversation with the supervisor confirms my fate, I already know that the options are few at such short notice. Still, a couple of trips in the Cirencester area on a clear and sunny morning can't be all that bad. Many people would pay for an excursion around idyllic Cotswold Villages and I get all this for free! After a few phone calls duties are changed, another driver is drafted in, I am collected from Cirencester to return to Nailsworth HQ and a sense of normality returns. So much frantic activity just to make sure all of the services run and to time! What will tomorrow bring and how much did today cost?

A day of more paperwork (how many trees had to die?) follows this unexpected early start. The in-tray disappeared some time ago under a teetering mountain of paper and I often dream of the day when I may catch a glimpse of black plastic, indicating that I have nearly reached the bottom!

The good news today is that commercial advertising may soon be gracing most of our vehicles with a new contract in the offing. All the income possible is needed to offset the horrendous fuel price increases of recent weeks.

But it can also be fun to spend! Finally the finance for a new ticket machine system is coming together and an order will soon be placed! Less paperwork is promised and the data will be at my fingertips instead of deciphering endless streams of numbers which then have to be entered into a spreadsheet to make any sense of them!

Not the best of days today but certainly not the worst!

The Day Of The Blog

Today is the day I have decided to start this blogging thing. I hope that there will be time enough in my hectic life to portray the trials and tribulations of running a small bus company!

Cotswold Green currently runs sixteen vehicles from its base in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire covering the southern half of the county and straying as far afield as Bath. Somewhere in the region of 26 employees inhabit our little world and maybe more about some of them another day!

Today was an ordinary low pressure day where the office was quiet except for the occasional timetable enquiry and the inevitable sales call. The final preparations for our new routes in Gloucester (241 to Sandhurst and 11 to Podsmead) should now be complete and I look forward to the start of these on Monday. The weather was nice today and reminds me that our depot sits in a really nice spot, in a valley surrounded by trees. Got to be better than the typical industrial estate location!

So that is all I have for the first installment, more another day.