A YEAR IN VIEW!

A YEAR OF BUS WARS AND COMPETITION

65540 R140 GSF spent some of it's year in limbo with a blown engine, surprisingly considering it's 15 year old age it received a  new engine and spends it's time mainly on town routes.

Could we say that 2012 was a good year for bus travel, it heralded certainly a contrasting year for many of the operators with both Anglian, Ipswich Buses and Stephensons taking on First Group in Ipswich when they announced that they would compete over  Ipswich Buses town routes so who was the winners and losers, well at first the people of Broke Hall and Bixley Farm were the losers when First Group announced they were to axe the 62 route and operate 2 services instead via Foxhall Road, one to Bixley the other to Broke Hall, this was carried out without anyone's knowledge until i contacted my local councillor and then all hell was let loose, eventually it all lead to IB reinstating service 4 along Felixstowe Road, the consequences of this has lead to people using the new service 4 instead of the 55/56 while Nacton Road now has some of all or part of the following routes 1/2/3/X3/6/75-77/60/61/70, since July IB has further upped the ante by routing the X3 into the new John Lewis and charging a flat fare of only a £1. As far as new buses were concerned nothing much changed  until  the bus war  when IB brought in more ex Stagecoach London Tridents and Darts and First a mix of Volvo B7RLES  from Norwich and some untidy Scania Wright Eclipses from Essex, both companies introduced new liveries on to the public, however we have yet to see First paint more than the 3 Volvo B7RLES in the new fleet livery with the remaining fleet seeing just the Ipswich name being added to their sides, more than likely due to early Scanias and Dart SLFs probably due to be replaced in the coming year i doubt we will see any repaints for the time being.