Their arrival was marked this week with a press launch at Wolverhampton’s Dunstall Park horseracing track with two of 37 buses scheduled for the 529 and 126 services present. Both were fully branded for the 529 between Wolverhampton and Walsall with those for the 126 Wolverhampton to Birmingham service scheduled to arrive soon. Apart from […]
In May 1987, the UK bus industry was coming to terms with the dual impacts of deregulation and the privatisation of National Bus Company subsidiaries. Outside of London, registration of new vehicles had dropped to very low levels. Most of them were minibuses as companies freed of many legislative constrictions sought new ways to compete […]
Richmond’s Coaches of Barley in Hertfordshire is a family business in every sense of the word. Not only have three generations of the Richmond family run it since former RAF Wellington pilot, Harold Victor Richmond (known as HVR), acquired the operations, fleet and premises of A Livermore in July 1946, but generations of other families […]
Tourism is a major business for Edinburgh with around 4m visitors every year pumping over £3.2bn into the city’s economy. That the bus and coach industry is a significant contributor to this was made clear when Lothian Buses MD, Richard Hall, welcomed guests to the recent launch of Edinburgh Bus Tours new £6.5m vehicle fleet […]
The International Bus & Coach of the Year awards, presented in turn at the IAA exhibition in Hanover and the Busworld Europe show in Kortrijk, Belgium, are the premier trophies in the industry, sought after by manufacturers from across Europe. To identify which vehicle should be presented with the title, a test is staged and […]
Electrification of urban bus services has been an objective of Wrightbus for nearly 20 years, company founder Dr William Wright CBE’s being recorded as expressing a view in 1998 that they were ‘likely to become the mainstream buses of the future’. Now in his late 80s, William is still passionately leading the company’s development work […]
Originally conceived four years ago by Robert Lodge of Lodge Coaches to attract CPT Essex members to an annual get-together, the North Weald Hog Roast and Ride & Drive event has grown to welcome CPT members from across the country. Dot Grainger has since taken over as Chair of CPT Essex with Bill Hiron as […]
Stuart Jones has been to Essex to see the first products produced for the UK in China by Bus & Coach International, an Australian business. He also took a look at a Volvo B7TL retrofitted with the B320 hybrid package by Vantage Power with the tempting prospect of a 40% saving on fuel. The […]