News from Oxford, High Wycombe
& the surrounding areas

update Monday, April 5th 1999 - 2300hrs

What may be termed as the lull before the storm saw the Easter weekend come and go ! No new Oxford tube coaches appeared in service and The Oxford Bus company surprised everyone by hiring in two coaches from Cliff's of High Wycombe to add additional capacity on the X90 for Boat Race Saturday.

Some unusual workings took place with COMS on Saturday as observed by your intrepid reporter. 401 appeared on 16 road, 406 on 2 road which has also seen Titans in recent weeks when 970 put in some runs. 406 was on 16 road on Easter Sunday. Apart from a couple of rostered turns on 60 road the new SLF Darts 401-410 have been kept on 13 road since new. With a number of surplus standard Darts 501-520, these earlier Darts can be seen on most routes from time to time, especially 2 and 15 roads. They are normally rostered for 2C, 2D, 16, 22 and 60 roads. It is the policy of management to make every effort to ensure that particular types are rostered to specific roads. These may be detailed as follows:

2, 2A - batch 601-615,619-628
2C,2D - batch 501-520
X3 - batch 616-618 (branded)
4 - batch 644-656  (sometimes a red Olympian is also resotered)
13 - batch 401-410
15 - batch 601-615,619-627
16 - batch 501-520
22 -  batch 501-520
35      batch Red Olympian Deckers between 201-224 with Volvo B10B's at weekends
51 - batch 777-783
52 - batch 629-643
60 - batch 501-520
61 - batch 777-783
300 - batch Green P&R Olympians plus Green Titan 950 and Red Titan 970
400 - batch Green P& R Olympians between 203 and 229
~~~~~~
52 road is due to receive new Volvo B10BLE's 801-815
300 and 400 roads are due to receive new Dennis Trident 2 deckers 101-120
35 road will receive cascaded Volvo B10B's off 2 road
2 road will receive cascaded Volvo B10B's off 52 road.
(These changes will take effect during June 99.)

The same policy cannot be said of Stagecoach, although every effort is made to keep the branded buses to their specific routes. It is possible within the rosters to see blue top M A N s in service on X33 to Abingdon. however on a route such as X39 to Heathrow, just about anything, except Deckers, can be seen and last weekend Mercedes Varios seemed to be the staple fayre. During the Christmas-New Year holiday period an orange topped M A N was even seen on the 100 to Witney.

The city has seen something of an improvement in the road works situation for the OTS (Oxford Transport Strategy). The High Street delays were somewhat eased with the closure of Longwall over the Easter break although the City was quieter than of late. A nice touch on the part of COMS is the posting of a notice from the Managing Director, Douglas Aide, asking for the understanding of customers and noting that it is not the fault of the drivers, when buses run late due to the massive programme of roadworks.