We had a successful evening on Friday at the IW Chanber of Commerce ‘Business Excellence Awards 2008′.  Southern Vectis won the award for ‘Green Business of the Year’ which is a great endorsment for our work over the last three years.  As well as carrying nerly half as many passengers again as we were three years ago, we’ve been working really hard to deliver not just good quality green public transport, but also to do so in an environmentally responsible manner.

We’ve already bought 7 £150k Mercedes single deck buses and 17 £170k Scania double deckers, and have another 11 of the Scanias due to arrive in January and March.  All these buses meet the latest tough emission standards, significantly reducing our output of emissions.

We’ve also got our own carbon management committee, charged with doing what we do more sustainably across the company.  We’re now printing all our timetables and leaflets on 100% recycled paper, and have just had energy saving lighting fitted in our main depot at Newport.  here are a host of other measures we are developing too. 

We’re nowhere near perfection, but we’re moving forward all the time.

The average overall cost of motoring has risen to £6,133 to keep a car on the road – a 19% increase from 2007.

VARIABLE	2008 – £	2007 – £
Depreciation	3183	2357
Fuel	1322	1129
Cost of Finance	510	618
Insurance	483	446
Maintenance	381	321
Tax	118	129
RAC Membership	136	133
Total cost (per year)	6133	5133
Total cost (per week)	117.94	98.71

There’s one on the front, one on the back, and on some one over each front wheel-arch, on others one by the fuel cap.  Every vehicle we run has it’s own unique number – but why?

In general terms, each of our vehicles has a number to identify it for a whole series of reasons – the number is it’s identity to us.  With over 100 vehicles, referring to them by their registration marks would be unwieldy.  So each of them has a three or four digit number. 

Our fuel pumps have to recognise each vehicle, as do our systems for ordering parts for example.

But there’s more to the number than that.  We have groups of similar vehicles, but also distinct different kinds of vehicles.  So our numbering system identifies vehicles that have common factors of particular relevance to us.

So, what does that number mean then…

The most significant numbers are those in front of the last two.  So, depending on what starts the number, tells us without any further reference, what sort of vehicle it is.  This is especially helpful when making sure that the right kind of bus is sent out in the right place.  It wouldn’t be any good if we sent a bus on route 1 that was too big to get through the archway at Fountain Yard, and we’d soon have problems if we sent a small bus out where we carry a double decker full of customers!  In addition, we use our low floor easy access buses on specific routes to provide as good as a guarantee of wheelchair and buggy access, so we need to get that right too.

Vehicle numbers starting with an ‘0’ are support vehicles, such as vans, staff cars and lorries.  The pattern continues like so…

0xx - Support Vehicles

1xx & 11xx – Low Floor Easy Access Double Deckers

2xx – Mini-coaches

3xx – Low Floor Easy Access Single Deckers short enough to get into Fountain Yard

4xx - Low Floor Easy Access Single Deckers too long to get into Fountain Yard

5xx – Coaches

6xx – Open Toppers and Road Trains

7xx – Conventional Access Double Deckers

8xx – Conventional Access Single Deckers short enough to get into Fountain Yard

9xx – Conventional Access Single Deckers too long to get into Fountain Yard

It’s that time of year when our attention turns to Christmas again.

Buses are running every day including Christmas Day this year, with a small team of volunteers covering Christmas Day.  Who would volunteer you may ask - well in addition to the four drivers we need for our services, we also have another nine who have volunteered to spend the festive period on the mainland, driving our coaches between Gatwick Airport and Central London covering for Gatwick Express trains!

The level of travel at Christmas shows just how much the whole economy and country has moved away from the traditional ‘closed’ periods of Christmas and indeed Sundays over the past decade.  Our job is to move with the times, making sure that we are there for our customers as best we reasonably can be, for those who work, visit or otherwise need to travel at these times - many of them are committed bus users with no realistic alternatives.

This year we made our plans early, so all the Christmas timetables were available in our timetable booklet from the end of August.

We are also busy planning our now infamous ‘Christmas Lights Tours’ - spend a couple of hours on a cold frosty night, sat upstairs on an open top bus - travelling round looking at some fantastic Christmas Lights displays!  This is clearly one of those ‘crazy ideas’ that caught the imagination.  We already have people calling us who travel every year wanting to book, and have a number of ‘private’ tours booked for whole buses.

The good news is that this year we have built into the tour and the price a hot drink and mince pie at ‘The Old World Tea Rooms’ in Godshill, themselves the proud owners of one of the Island’s ’super’ displays.

Keep an eye out on the website for booking details as soon as they are released!

Unlike our sister companies in ‘Go South Coast’ we still paint our buses by hand. Alan our coach painter paints one approximately every two weeks at our garage in Ryde, which also houses our body shop, where we repair acident damage, carry out light refurbishment work, and all manner of peculiar things such as making tree cutting vehicles out of old open top buses, or cutting the roof off a double decker to make it an open topper in the first place.

Anyway, returning to painting, one of our sister companies happens to be ‘Hants and Dorset Trim’, who as well as being a specialist in accident repairs, conversion and refurbishment work, also have a state of the art paint shop where they prepare and spray buses. They are a big business, carrying out this type of work for a wide range of bus companies, not just those within our parent ‘Go Ahead Group’ or our sister ‘Go South Coast’ companies, but others across the UK bus industry.

However, we don’t send our buses there, not least because our existing system works very well for us. Every couple of weeks a bus enters our bodyshop at Ryde. It has any damaged panels replaced and any other rectification work undertaken, and then after about a week it is moves just round the corner and into the paint shop. There is it meticulously rubbed down, undercoated, then given a coat or two of shiny gloss. Next, in come Fuhrmann Signs, the best sign company known to us, based in the St Tropez of the Island (Ventnor, of course!) to apply all manner of vinyl wonders, depending on what kind of livery it has just received.

So, about three weeks after arriving, we have a shiny, resplendent bus or coach, ready to show us off on the Island’s byways and highways.

If it’s part of our ‘green’ bus fleet, the buses that operate our regular bus network, then it gets two greens, followed by some flashy fade-out vinyls and the Southern Vectis fleetnames.

If it’s an open top for our ‘Island Breezers’ fleet, then it gets three different blues and an orange half sun on the sides, followed by an vinyl orange ‘glow’ around the sun, and some nice fluffy clouds;

If it’s a coach, then it could be in any of our three coach colours - all over orange with big ‘Fountain Coaches’ names - two blues and big traditional ‘Moss Motor Tours’ names and badges - or raspberry and grey with some flashy red stripes and ‘West Wight’ names;

And of course, they all get a name when they are painted. All our buses and coaches are named after coastal features from around our shoreline.

Sometimes Al gets a ’special’ instead of one from the menu. He’s recently repainted our 1939 Bristol open top in it’s best known traditional Cream and Green, and a couple of weeks ago he painted one of our vans that needed a spruce up!

Anyway, the great thing is that once we’ve painted all 100 ish buses and coaches, we simply start again, so the big advantage of painting them ourselves is that we just keep on going. In theory every vehicle should get painted about every four years, so should be relatively smart (though they do lead a hard life, especially wth hedges and bus washes to battle on a daily basis!).

Anyway, why you may ask, am I driven to writing about painting. Well, it’s one of those frustrating times in a way. In the short term we have a fair number of coaches that have been transferred to us - we are in the process of moving a lot of our schools work from buses to dedicated drivers in single deck seat belted coaches - parents like the regularity and the seat belts, and we like the significany improvement in behaviour all the factors combined bring - and we have a fair few more due in soon. We also have around a dozen of our 2004 Dennis single deckers still in that horrible colour scheme with the white and green traingles splattered all over them.

So, at one vehicle a fortnight, in the short term we have to live with a motley collection of other people’s colour schemes on some of our coaches, and still endure the flying triangles on the Dennis’s. Nevertheless, in the long term once we have painted them, we’ll then be rapidly painting buses already in our new colour scheme again, maing the fleet look really tidy. Short term pain for long term gain!