Bus-ing Around The Cotswolds 2-7/6/24-#Just£2/25

Cheltenham Royal Wells bus station

Once again I’d found another worthy route to bash that was a little awkward logistically to get in the book but seemed well worth going to the trouble of getting to it it!

The route concerned is Stagecoach’s S2, once running from Oxford to the small town of Carterton via Witney, taking a more direct route than it’s sister service S1 between the same points. I’d travelled on both of these routes before, back in 2016 with my friend Phil Tonks, after riding the short lived Oxford Airline coach service, run by Go Ahead’s Oxford Bus Company, from Birmingham Airport-Oxford (see “Buses For Fun” blog “Oxford By Airline!”) However, for around a year, the service was diverted from Carterton to run to Cheltenham, replacing the previous 853 which Stagecoach took over from the independent Swanbrook Coaches in 2020. As the S2 was operated by double deckers, as opposed to the single deckers that were used on the 853, this sounded an incredibly attractive run through the Cotswolds but the cost of buying two single rail tickets to/from Oxford & Cheltenham (from Birmingham, both being Cross Country territory, so not cheap, though booking in advance would bring that cost down a bit) so really, it was being able to reach at least one side of the S2 using the £2 maximum bus fare that made that cost reasonable, hence my decision to do this before that scheme officially comes to an end on 31st December 2024 (what exactly happens then will probably depend on who wins the General Election on 4th July!)

This first leg, getting me down to Cheltenham, was almost a repeat of the move I made in the first “Bus-ing Around The Cotswolds” blog last September, so I made my way to The Hawthorns on a packed, peak hour West Midlands Metro tram (CAF 100 44) then bought a £10.50 Transport for West Midlands (TfWM) Network ticket and then waited for the next train. I had intended to catch the 07.39 to Dorridge but I was in time for the 07.23 to Stratford via Shirley, so I decided that I might as well catch this to Birmingham Moor Street and then see if a Chiltern Railways service would take me onto Solihull, so West Midlands Railways 172 341, as part of a five car set with a 172/2 unit, took me into town, though I must admit that, as I was heading for Stratford, a ride down the attractive North Warwickshire Line was appealing but, of course, my Network ticket wasn’t valid beyond Earlswood and my alternative move, thanks to the maximum £2 bus fare was significantly cheaper! A look on the realtime trains website told me that a Chiltern train left from the same platform one that this train called at at Moor Street, so I got off there and waited for 168 218 to emerge out of the Snow Hill tunnel that 172 341 had just bought me through and boarded it for a quick blast down to Solihull.

Here, I caught the first bus towards the Poplar Road shopping area, which was National Express West Midlands (NXWM) MMC E200 2217 on the 4 to Birmingham, getting off at Poplar Road, where I waited for the first Stagecoach X20 to Stratford of the day at 08.52, watching the late morning peak Solihull bus scene as I did so, with a few elderly NXWM Yardley Wood based Dennis Tridents passing on the 49 to Rubery and 76 to Queen Elizabeth Hospital whilst a similarly aged Acocks Green based Wright Gemini bodied Volvo B7 was on the 72 to Chelmsley Wood, buses that are now on borrowed time, being withdrawn whenever a major failure occurs, although more general withdrawals of at least the Euro 6 engined examples of these older buses in the NXWM fleet have earned a little reprieve following the company currently returning 2009 E400s 4799-4815/4817-4829 back to their owning leasing company, as they are displaced at my garage at Perry Barr with the new electric MMC E400 City bodied BYDs that are currently entering service, with it being recently announced that the displaced E400s have been sold to the Go Ahead group, with some due to go to Carousal Buses in High Wycombe, where they will cover some of the new services registered to replace services that Arriva are withdrawing as they close their High Wycombe & Aylesbury garages.

Newer NXWM buses also mingled with Stagecoach E200s on various tendered services, as well as the white MMC E200s of Land Air, whose A prefixed tendered network provides most of the local services around here, of which I confess that I’m not too familiar with, so this reminded me that it would be nice to have a ride on some of these at some point.

The X20

Bang on time, Stagecoach Enviro 400 bodied Scania 15673, branded for the X18 route from Coventry-Stratford, turned up on the X20, so I boarded, paid my first £2 fare of the day and grabbed the front seat, for the run through affluent Sharmans Cross to Shirley, where we joined the original route of the X20 (and Midland Red 150 before that!) from Birmingham, along the A34 (most of this section now being the A3400) to Stratford Upon Avon. Regular readers will recall that last year, I managed four trips on this route, courtesy of the £2 bus fare, but this was the first opportunity I’d had to ride the route in 2024. I doubt that it will be the last!

Of course, it’s a route that I’ve enjoyed travelling on many times over the years, particularly on a double decker (ohhh memories of trips on buses like the last surviving D13 Alexander bodied Daimler Fleetline 6197) which I’m pleased to say Stagecoach have bought back following their takeover of the route from Diamond in August 2022, this being shortly after Diamond had acquired both this and many other routes from Henley In Arden coach operator Johnsons when they decided to concentrate on coach work, virtually all those services subsequently passing to Stagecoach, prompting the Scottish giant to reopen it’s former Stratford garage, as an out station of Leamington, which operates the two buses needed to run the X20.

Leaving the West Midlands county after Hockley Heath, we headed into the Warwickshire countryside, soon passing the other bus on the X20 today, the E400 bodied Scania that Stagecoach have painted into the livery of Stratford Blue, the former subsidiary of Midland Red that operated out of Stratford, including joint operation with it’s Midland Red parent on the 150 from 1952 until Stratford Blue was absorbed fully into Midland Red on 1st January 1971;

We headed on through Henley In Arden, it’s famous ice cream shop opening up for the day, the blue skies suggesting that the shop should receive plenty of custom! I keep meaning to either ride the X20 or the North Warwickshire line out to here to sample one of those ice creams but it’s something that I never seem to get around to doing! Then, it was onwards, through Wootton Wawen and onto Stratford Upon Avon;

As can be seen, the sky was now nice and blue, and the sun was rising in the sky, prompting me to go and buy an ice cream from one of the boats moored in the canal that sell them, then sit on a bench watching the buses go by! Nice to see a Stagecoach Dennis Trident pop up on the 28 to Evesham, can’t be tool long now before the end comes for them, so I’m glad I got rides on a couple last year (see blog “A Trident, A Trident, My Kingdom For A Trident!”) whilst open top versions of the type continue to be the mainstay of the Stratford City Sightseeing Tour that is franchised to Stagecoach.

Stagecoach E400 bodied Scanias and E200 saloons dominated the scene, with just two other operators making an appearance. Diamond, despite having lost all their former Johnsons work to Stagecoach, were running an Optare Solo on a local office contract, whilst my next bus would be a Pulhams Mercedes Benz Citaro, on the 51 to Moreton In The Marsh;

The 51

There are three routes linking Stratford with the Gloucestershire Cotswold town of Moreton In The Marsh. On my last Cotswold trip, I’d travelled on one of the two Stagecoach routes, the 2 and would have liked to have travelled on it’s sister service, the 1 via Broadway. Both came to Stagecoach, like the X20, from Johnsons via a brief spell with Diamond. Sadly, the timetable of the 1 didn’t plan out (non of these routes being particularly frequent) but I’ve a plan to get it in the book another way sometime this year!

But luckily, the timetable for the third service, Pulhams 51 via Shipston On Stour, fitted my plans today perfectly, a departure leaving Stratford at 10.51. I’d spotted this on last year’s Cotswold trip but I decided that the Stagecoach routes, via Chipping Campden, covered areas that were much more unfamiliar to me…..though it had been many years since I’d headed through the town of Shipston On Stour, so it was nice to get the 51 in the book now.

Two Senior Concessionary Pass holders boarded with me, with one of them knowing the lady driver, Katie, who seems to be the regular driver on the service, though their conversation revealed that Katie has just had a week off! This passenger also gave Katie a packet of Cadburys chocolate, reminding me of the days when I used to drive the (much busier!) Birmingham Outer Circle and regularly got Crunchies from the former Cadbury Pensioners who got stuff from the factory shop at Bourneville!

As I mentioned in last year’s Cotswold blog, Pulham’s were an independent who, last year, sold to the Go Ahead group,  who seem to have given the operation fleet numbers that appear on tickets but aren’t painted on the actual buses themselves,  my £2 ticket telling me that this was bus 887.

Interestingly, the loading stop was pointing in the opposite direction to the way buses towards the south of the town (which also includes the 1 & 2) have always gone, over the old stone bridge across the River Avon,  so I was wondering exactly what our bus would do, as we headed up to the Market Place,  where we picked up some more passengers, then headed to the left, passing along some unfamiliar to me roads that bought us to a much newer bridge across the Avon,  which we crossed.

Then, it was through much pleasant countryside until we reached the town of Shipston On Stour, where I’ve not been through by bus since 2006, when I rode a Stagecoach Alexander bodied Volvo Olympian on the then 50A from Stratford-Banbury (Stagecoach’s 75 broadly covers this route now) but I’ve only ever got off a bus here once before, that being around this time of year in 1988!

In last year’s “A Trident,  A Trident,  My Kingdom For A Trident!” blog,  I explained about the idyllic early summer day where I’d ridden 6197, the final Midland Red South D13 Fleetline in service for the last time, on a 212 out to Alcester via Broom, returning as a direct 208 back to Stratford.  Well,  after fish and chips from Barnabys, I then caught an S28 dual purpose Marshall bodied Leyland Leopard on the then X50 Birmingham-Oxford service, the timetable telling me that I could catch this to Shipston, have around a forty five minute wait, then catch the last X50 through to Birmingham back, with me finding a local pub for a swift pint of Draught Bass in that forty five minute wait! Another of those wonderful S28 Leopards took me back to Birmingham.  A year later, and the X50 would be gone, aside from the odd, mostly Sunday only revival (plus the time in 1999 when Stagecoach boldly introduced an hourly service over the whole route, which went before I had a chance to ride it!)

The X50 had been started as a through joint service by Midland Red and then fellow National Bus Company (NBC) subsidiary Oxford South Midlands in 1976, from Stratford replacing what had once been Oxford & Stratford Blue’s 44 to Oxford. Unusually, Midland Red also had a share of routes in this direction in Stratford Blue days, with the 519 running along, I think, to Chipping Norton, and the 480 once running across to Banbury, the latter being now essentially covered by Stagecoach’s 75.

The 519, later 219, would ultimately become the 50, which would basically replace the X50 between Stratford & Chipping Norton. Today, this service is very much down to a few journeys, a shame as it would be a good way of linking into Stagecoach’s hourly S3 from Chipping Norton-Oxford. So the 51, along with the 75, all add to the somewhat sparse service to Stratford.

We pulled quite close to the stop that I recognised from my 1988 visit, though we stopped around the corner from it. The next stretch of route followed the course of the former Midland Red route 392, a twisty rural service that I imagine once being in the hands of the lightweight BMMO S14 and the only Midland Red route to serve Moreton In The Marsh, from where it then continued to make it’s way towards Evesham, where the service would have been garaged. There was also a more direct service from Evesham-Shipston On Stour in the form of the 398 but both these rather irregular routes are long gone.

The path that the 51 takes it’s relatively few passengers along is delightfully rural, heading along the old Roman Fosse Way but branching off it to serve villages like Stretton On Fosse, full of Cotswold stone built architecture, which would follow me around for most of the rest of the day. This scenic path took me to Moreton In The Marsh station, where the 51 terminates, and the bus then reversed into a corner to await it’s next journey, with Katie putting this “Driver On BreaK” blind, the likes of which I’ve never seen before!

The 801

As soon as I’d got off the Citaro, a bus on my next planned route soon appeared, this being one of Pulhams newer buses, entering service just before the company was bought by Go Ahead in 2023, an MCV Evora bodied Volvo B5 that, unlike the grey liveried Citaro, was painted in Pulhams traditional red & cream livery, on the company’s main 801 trunk route to Cheltenham;

The Citaro fitted in well with Pulham’s new owners, as Go Ahead had bought several batches for several of it’s subsidiaries, including Pulhams new parent, the Oxford Bus Company and would be one of the few purchasers of the type to come back for repeat orders, others not doing this not through any problems with the bus but simply because the Citaro was probably the most expensive bus on the market, many operators feeling that this sophisticated bus was simply unaffordable, a factor which probably deprived the type of orders from other operators in the very cost conscious deregulated British bus industry, with this seemingly applying to Pulhams, who have moved on from the Citaros to MCV Evora bodied Volvo B5s like what my £2 ticket revealed to be bus 804. Most certainly nothing wrong with the Volvo chassis but but I’ve always tended to find MCV bodywork a little……well, cheap is really the only word I can use! I particularly have problems with the legroom on such buses and this example, I’m afraid, is a case in point, as the only seat I could comfortably fit into was the one by the emergency exit, which was fortunately free, unlike the trip I made on an example on my 801 journey last year, where I had to squeeze in up the back! So a retrograde step from the company’s Citaros but, given the cost pressures upon the bus industry, who could blame a small company in such a financially tough area as Pulhams serves, for having to go for the best value model that it could find? I suppose it was those financial pressures which also persuaded the company owners to sell to Go Ahead.

Since my last trip, Go Ahead have made some improvements to the 801, increasing the frequency from every 90 minutes to hourly and more recently extending from it’s previous Moreton In The Marsh Station (on the Cotswold Line from Worcester-Oxford, with most trains running through to/from London Paddington) to Chipping Norton. I had considered trying to fit this new section into today’s bash but was unable to work something out, enabling me to form in my mind another plan, which will hopefully see me use the 1 to reach Moreton, then take the 801 to Chipping Norton, then the Stagecoach 488 to Banbury. Hopefully, I’ll get the chance to make this move before the £2 maximum fare ceases!

But for now, I was to travel over the traditional route of the 801, Pulham’s long established main trunk route, as I did last year and partially did in 2018, with my wife Lynn one Saturday, having took the train from Worcester-Moreton then intending to get the 801 to Bourton On The Water but being thwarted on this by an accident causing our journey to be delayed by a good fifty minutes, so we decided to get off in Stowe On The Wold instead, our return trip that day being on board two of Pulham’s Citaros (see blog “The Cotswolds By Train & Bus”) so it’s a route that I’m now a little familiar with.

Picking up a few at the station, we headed around the corner into the quaint, yellowing Cotswold stone filled Town Centre, where we picked up more passengers, illustrating that this was a far busier route than the 51 is. We then headed back out to the Fosse Way and continued along this tree lined road towards Stowe, soon joining a traffic queue that uncomfortably reminded me of that first trip in 2019 but this time caused by temporary traffic lights, which we gradually made our way towards, and eventually through, then soon entering the Town Centre of Stowe On The Wold, which we found in 2019 to be a lovely place that was very popular with tourists, a town again filled ith the delightful Cotswold stone.

As well as several leaving the bus, more boarded before we made our way back out of the town and continued our way further down the Fosse Way to Bourton On The Water, a similar but larger town to Stowe and very much the centre of the Cotswold tourist industry. Before we reached here though, we passed through an industrial estate where the company’s garage is sited, which I don’t remember passing on my trip last year, so perhaps this is a new routing made by Go Ahead to make driver reliefs easier, although this wasn’t scheduled for on this journey, so we drove straight past and headed into the charming but busy Town Centre, where many passengers got off, with several more joining. One of the intending passengers was a lady asking for a place called Northleach, which the driver said this journey didn’t serve, with the next bus being the 801 three hours away! Obviously an occasional variation of the route.

Making our way out of Stowe, we headed towards the main A40 Cheltenham-Oxford Road, with the sign to Cheltenham pointing right…..only for the bus to do that typically country bus thing of turning in the opposite direction! This was so we could serve the village of Andoversford, where we met the route of the S2 that was my intended next bus. We headed through the village and joined the A40 in the right direction, this taking us towards Cheltenham, suburban development beginning at Charlton Kings and continuing into the Town Centre, most getting off at a Town Centre stop, where I noticed a pub serving Butcombe ales. I considered getting off here and visiting but decided to take the 801 to it’s terminus, the Royal Wells bus station:

Cheltenham

This delightful, tree lined bus station is also where the S2 starts from, so I looked for the relevant stand, which I soon found by finding this nice piece of Stagecoach publicity for the route;

Also present here was one of the buses that replaced the Citaro that I rode on the 51, on the 99 Cheltenham-Gloucester Hospital service, this being a low height Wright Gemini 3 bodied Volvo B9 that had been transferred to Pulhams from fellow Go Ahead subsidiary Oxford Bus Company, displaced from that city by new electric Wright Electroliners, which we’ll see later;

As can be seen behind the Gemini, the bus station was filled with parked coaches, the blue & orange coach in view belonging to Gloucester firm Bennetts, whilst I believe the white examples belonged to Marchants, a firm I often get confused with Pulhams, as they also once operated local bus services but give these up in 2019, concentrating since on coach work, including school contracts.

Later, a Marchants double decker would park up, the centre staircase on it’s Alexander ALX400 bodywork giving away it’s London origins. From it’s engine noise, I suspect it’s a DAF, probably one of the pioneering Arriva fleet of low floor double deckers, though I maybe wrong on this!

As I’d caught an earlier 801 than planned, I now had ninety minutes in Cheltenham, hence why I’d thought about getting off at the Butscombe pub but anyhow, I decided that I’d try and find it now, the trouble being that the 801 had taken quite a convoluted route around a one way system to reach the bus station, though I figured that I’d easily find a more direct route by walking, thinking that I’d recognise the area easily……I didn’t, so I settled on visiting the local KFC instead!

Face filled, I made my way back to the bus station amongst the lettered Town Services run by Stagecoach, successor to the Cheltenham & Gloucester former NBC subsidiary that was created to takeover the northern side of the Bristol Omnibus Company in 1983, the Cheltenham operations reviving the name of the former Cheltenham District company, originally a subsidiary of the Red & White Group, who sold to the nationalised British Transport Commission, who had already acquired the Tilling Group that owned Bristol in 1948, hence a swap was made in 1950 for Bristol to take over Cheltenham District in exchange for Red & White taking over Bristol’s Forest Of Dean services. Cheltenham District was retained as a separate subsidiary, along with it’s red & cream livery, would be retained until early NBC days, when it was fully absorbed into Bristol, only to return in 1983, with the new Cheltenham & Gloucester using NBC’s poppy red scheme (replacing Bristol’s NBC leaf green) as a nod to Cheltenham District’s past.

The lettered service identification on the Town Services was introduced upon the introduction of Metro branded minibuses to the town around 1986, these using a silver based livery. A management buyout would see Cheltenham & Gloucester pass to the private sector, bringing a slight modification to the former NBC style liveries the company used (as well as Cheltenham District, the company’s Swindon & District operations also used poppy red, whilst Stroud Valleys had kept Bristol’s leaf green. The City Of Gloucester side, though, had raised the most eyebrows by adopting a dark blue livery to the NBC style.) The management created a holding company called Western Travel for the buyout, who would go on to buy fellow NBC subsidiaries Midland Red South (who then ran the X20 that I’d travelled on earlier, though running then to Birmingham) and the Red & White company that had originally owned Cheltenham & Gloucester but would sell to Stagecoach in December 1993, which saw the varied liveries of these operators wiped away by the Stagecoach corporate style.

Stagecoach no longer have complete dominance of the lettered Town Services, with Pulhams now operating four (L, P, Q,& R) , whilst the K to Benhall is now the only local service operated by Swanbrook Coaches, once a cause celebre in the early eighties, as an operator who embraced the changes in the law bought about by the 1980 Transport Act, mainly known for introducing deregulation for express coach services (then services not carrying local passengers within thirty miles, reduced to fifteen miles with the 1985 Transport Act which bought us local bus service deregulation in October 1986) but also changing the burden of proof for operators wishing to commence local (then called stage carriage) bus services, objectors now having to prove that services were against the Public interest, rather than the operator prove that there was an actual need for a new service, this leading the way for several, mostly small operators like Swanbrook, owned by a former Miner who would boast both personally and through company publicity (“Cheap fares made Swanbrook a Millionaire!”) that his entrepreneurship had made him a millionaire, then somewhat rare amongst small bus operators and only really replicated later when the growth of the large groups such as Stagecoach would make millionaires of owners such as Stagecoach’s former owner Brian Souter. Swanbrook would become a thorn in the side to Bristol in the area, even featuring in a 1985 episode of “Venture”, Central TV’s monthly programme about business developments! The total local bus service deregulation that commenced on 26th October 1986 would see everyone put on the same commercial footing and, similar to several of those enterprising pioneers of the 1980 Transport Act, Swanbrook would decline in importance, to the point where the coach operation is now once again the main part of the business.

Stagecoach’s numbered routes provide services heading out of Cheltenham, the most prominent being the various routes to Gloucester, operated by the former Gold branded double deckers, most of which now feature Stagecoach’s yellow “distance” livery, the 94 being the most direct of these services, whilst the 10 via Brockworth runs through to Lower Tuffley in the Gloucester suburbs (see blog “Great British Rail Sale-Part Four-Gloucestershire”) with the 97 & 98 providing less direct links.

When I’d left the Royal Wells, a fair size queue with case was waiting at the stand which was emblazoned with National Express signs, including a bar code where perspective passengers could purchase tickets, though another notice also stated that passengers preferring to purchase their tickets the old fashioned way could do so from Marchants Travel Shop that was just around the corner! My return to the bus station saw the coach arriving, this being owned by the aforementioned Bennetts and was on the 444 to London;

Seeing the 444 load reminded me of Cheltenham’s history with express coach services, although not from the Royal Wells, as the town was home to Black & White Motorways, a company that was bought by Midland Red in the twenties, though ownership would be shared with several other large bus company’s, including Bristol’s Greyhound coach operation, who were all looking to develop the fledgling long distance coach network. The introduction of the Road Traffic Act 1930, which bought a new licensing regime to the industry (that which would eventually be wiped away by the 1980 & 1985 Transport Acts) saw Black & White be a leading light behind the creation of the Associated Motorways consortium of operators, taking the 1930 Act’s desire to integrate the various developing coach services. Centrepiece of this was the 1931 opened St Margarets Coach Station in Cheltenham, which acted as a major connectional hub for the network, a mass interchange taking place at 14.00 daily, allowing many interchange opportunities.

Nearly all of the Associated Motorways members would become part of NBC (Black & White itself becoming part of National Travel South West, although the name would return under Cheltenham & Gloucester ownership until ceasing in 1984) the Associated Motorways network becoming an integral part of the National Express network, but the Cheltenham Interchange would ultimately cease due to the Motorway network largely seeing services by pass Cheltenham, so the Interchange would be replaced in 1984 by more frequent two hourly interchanges at places like Birmingham & Bristol, the coach station closing shortly afterwards.

Today, the National Express network, closed down during the pandemic, has been largely rejigged to concentrate on the main flows, especially towards London, facing the growing competition from the likes of the Stagecoach started Megabus network (now mostly owned by the Delgro group) and more recently the growing Flixbus network. This concentration on the main flows is understandable, although it does mean that making a long distance trip by public transport from those small towns without a railway station is now rather more awkward than was the case in the days of the Associated Motorways network!

The S2

But, although my next journey was a good forty miles long, it would be on a normal, local stopping service, though it’s ultimate destination on the blinds displayed Burford rather than Oxford, to comply with the, in my opinion, rather pointless former EU rules stating that local bus services shouldn’t be longer that fifty killometers (around thirty miles.)

The bus concerned would be Stagecoach MMC E400 11250, fitted with the rather sumptuous, E leather covered seats that Stagecoach introduced with it’s now discontinued Gold brand (in fact, the first service to use Gold branded double deckers was the Cheltenham-Gloucester 94), which was on the long S2 from Oxford;

Although both operations are now managed by the Stagecoach West division of the group, whose £8 day ticket mentioned on the S2 timetable covers a wide area;

…..rather than the former Cheltenham & Gloucester Cheltenham garage, the S2 is actually operated by the Stagecoach Oxford operation from it’s Witney garage, formerly owned by City of Oxford but hived off to the South Midlands company when what had become known as Oxford South Midland under NBC (following the City of Oxford merger with the formerly Thames Valley owned South Midland coach company that ran Oxford-London services) was split up in 1985, with City Of Oxford retaining the Oxford City services and London coach services, whilst South Midlands took over the company’s country garages, such as Witney. South Midlands would be bought by Harry Blundred’s Transit Holdings, which that Devon General Manager had set up to form a buyout of Devon General, then formed Oxford Transit to compete on Oxford’s city services using their trademark minibuses, as well as introducing the Oxford Tube, an Oxford-London coach service that competed with what was then the 190 City Of Oxford service via the M40 to London. Today, only the Oxford Tube survives on the corridor, although City Of Oxford’s Go Ahead owned Oxford Bus Company successor does run the Airline coach services from Oxford to Heathrow & Gatwick.

1996 would see Transit Holdings sell South Midlands to Stagecoach, forming Stagecoach Oxford, who operate today’s S2.

I confess that I knew relatively little about the history of the Cheltenham-Oxford service but a little research has dug up the fact that it has it’s origins as one of the Great Western Railway’s (GWR) longer distance bus services, the route starting in 1928 but, in line with common practice once the railways began to buy substantial shareholdings in the territorial bus companies that were then challenging the railways dominance of public transport, the GWR would transfer that Cheltenham-Gloucester service to one of these, Bristol Tramways, which later renamed itself Bristol Omnibus Company, in 1932. Interestingly, one of the reasons that the GWR had started the service was to provide a connection into the Oxford-London Paddington train service, this being actually then quicker than the direct train from Cheltenham via Swindon! It’s nice to see that the S2 poster promotes the possibility of using the S2 to connect into the Oxford Tube, with through ticketing, providing some competition to National Express’s 444, as well as the current GWR’s train service to London!

Bristol would at some point,  I suspect in the seventies, when many NBC subsidiaries were heavily cutting back rural services, withdraw the Cheltenham-Oxford route, with a replacement 853 (like the 801, the 8xx number signified a service in Gloucestershire operated by an independent company) being provided for many years by the aforementioned Swanbrook Coaches but they would pull off the service in 2020, undoubtedly as an effect of the pandemic being the final straw.

Stagecoach would takeover the route, with 2022 seeing the company take the opportunity to operate the service more economically by rerouting the S2, the pleasant side effect of this being the use of double deckers on the service.

A reasonable load boarded, a happy mixture of concessionary pass holders and £2 fare payers, some asking for through tickets to Oxford, some for the various intermediate points that are the main reason why this service has survived. Settling into a comfortable,  upstairs seat, we headed out of town via the same route that I’d headed in on the 801, following this along the A40 to Andoversford, which the S2 also served but then continued along the fairly straight A40, next diverging to serve Northleach,  the place where the 801 makes a few diversions to, with that young lady who enquired of my 801 driver in Bourton finding out to her dismay that she had a three hour wait for the next such diversion! Pity the driver couldn’t have advised of doing the move I made as an alternative,  though I suspect that,  even if he was aware of the S2’s existence, he was highly unlikely to be aware of it’s rather sparse timetable!

Northleach was yet another well spread out village of charming yellow Cotswold stone but seemed to be quieter traffic wise than Stow and Bourton had been, suggesting that it’s not the tourist trap that the other two are. The same could be said of Burford, the next town that we served. It’s seems a little churlish to say that such delightful towns, with such delightful architecture seemed a little repetitive but it did seem like that! Doubtless those who know this area far better than I will point out more defining differences between them but today, just travelling through them, it was difficult to define such differences, so I just revelled in their loveliness!

Of course, the countryside between these villages and towns was just breath taking, all seen to maximum effect from the top deck of a double decker, the S2 certainly being the first time that such buses have been used on this route in recent years, in fact, I’m not sure if Bristol ever did!

We soon were soon approaching the outskirts of Witney, calling at the former City Of Oxford garage that is the S2’s home, where we changed driver;

I remembered the last time that I’d been here, back in August 2016 with my friend Phil. We’d come to Oxford on the sadly short lived Oxford Bus Company Airline service between Birmingham Airport & Oxford (see the “Buses For Fun” blog “Oxford By Airline”) and had then decided to ride some of the Stagecoach services that had then recently been converted to Gold double deckers. As the descendents of former City Of Oxford services that had passed to South Midlands when the company was split, the services linking Witney with Oxford were once solidly double deckers, featuring that standard NBC staple, the ECW bodied Bristol VR by 1985 but the company takeover by Transit Holdings saw that group’s fondness for minibuses extend to these services, using the Mercedes Benz vehicles that the company had standardised on in it’s Devon heartland for inter urban services.

The Stagecoach takeover would see the buses on such interurban routes get bigger, initially with Volvo B10M saloons, the services from Oxford to various points getting the S prefix, this originally standing for Superbus! The conversion to Gold double deckers would follow.

Back in 2016, as now, the main routes from Oxford-Witney were the S1 & S2, with both in 2016 then continuing onto the smaller town of Carterton, close to RAF Brieze Norton and both Phil & I remember how busy those services were, with the S1 running every fifteen minutes as far as an estate quite close to Witney garage, then running half hourly through to Carterton, whilst the faster S2 also ran half hourly. Now though, the S1 only runs half hourly throughout, whilst the extended S2 is only two hourly. Later, my friend Kevin would tell me that the S2 had initially run hourly to Witney after it’s Cheltenham extension, whilst the S1 was modified to run every twenty minutes throughout. However, both routes have had to follow a temporary but long term rerouting out of Oxford due to the rebuilding of the railway bridge next to Oxford Railway Station, hence the need to reduce frequencies to match resources. As I was currently travelling against the natural traffic flow, things were relatively quiet as we headed through one last Cotswold stone filled Town Centre but I wondered how it affected outward loads…or had the pandemic damaged the strong loadings that Phil & I had encountered in 2016?

Re-joining the A40 for the final stretch towards Oxford, it was noticeable how much busier the road had become, with sections of dual carriageway helping to cope with the traffic, illustrating that we were leaving the more rural environment of the Cotswolds and entering the much more populated Thames Valley.

Oxford

On the approaches to Oxford, we passed close to the village of Eynsham (served itself by the S1) where there was a nearly complete new Park & Ride site, making a fifth example serving the city, which was a pioneer in the Park & Ride concept, with the Go Ahead owned Oxford Bus Company providing services to the other four. As we entered the Oxford suburbs, we would encounter the Cross City 300 which links the Redbridge & Pear Tree Park & Ride sites with the City Centre which, like most of the Oxford Bus Company fleet, is now operated by electric Wright Electroliners;

….whilst Wright Kite electric single deckers operate the City service along this corridor, the 6;

Stagecoach too, are converting their City fleet to electric, though I wouldn’t see any of their electrics today.

We used the city’s excellent bus lanes and priorities, these helping to support the excellent bus services that serve the city, to reach the City Centre, terminating in George Street;

I had just missed a scheduled departure on my next intended route, the S4 to Banbury, meaning a fifty minute wait here, so time for a pint! Immediately by the S2 terminus are actually two pubs advertising real ale, the one’s a Green King pub but next door is a small looking building called The Grapes, which advertises up to forty real ales & ciders, so I went in! Now, I only found four hand pumps, but the beer mentioned on the first one I spotted was one that’s incredibly difficult to find this far North.

Harvey’s Sussex Best is brewed in the town of Lewes and I’ve only ever sampled it twice! It was introduced to me, like so many beers, by my old mate John Batchelor in 2004 (twenty years ago! Ohhh My!), whilst bashing the old Southern Region Class 205 “Thumper” Diesel Electric Multiple Units on the Oxted-Uckfield line before their imminent replacement by Class 171 Turbostar units, when we visited an absolutely marvellous pub in Uckfield, not too far from the Lewes brewery. Then, some fourteen years later, in 2018, when my wife Lynn and I visited the preserved Bluebell Railway, I had another pint of this incredible brew at the railway’s Besssemere Arms pub at Sheffield Park (see the “Buses For Fun” blog “The Bluebell Railway”) so as you can see, I was well due a reacquaintance with the beer! I grabbed a seat by the window to watch the passing buses, the first pint going down so smoothly that I just had to have a second!

It was then that I received a message on Facebook Messenger off my friend Kevin Fitzpatrick, who works at Oxford Airport (yes, there is one but it’s mostly a business park, with a small airfield for private planes) but lives in Banbury and uses the S4 to commute. I’d contacted Kevin the day before to see if he fancied meeting me at Banbury’s Ye Olde Reindeer, a Hook Norton Brewery pub in Banbury that Kevin had introduced me to in 2019 (see blog “Banbury 100-Part Two”) but, today, he’d declined as he was due to go to Birmingham (he’s from Great Barr originally) that evening. However, Kevin’s message stated that the S4 timetable was in total turmoil thanks to the M40 Motorway having been closed due to an accident, leading to traffic converging on the old main road between Oxford & Banbury, causing virtual gridlock! This, of course, is the route of the S4!

Thinking quickly, my only alternative was to take the train, my original plan involving getting the train from Banbury back to the West Midlands anyway. I decided, however, not to buy an Oxford-Birmingham single, as this fare, controlled by Cross Country who run the main Bournemouth-Manchester service that link’s Oxford & Birmingham, plus the now occasional Reading-Newcastle service that makes a half hourly service at times, is at Cross Country’s usual rather extortionate rate for walk on fares, I figured that it would be cheaper to buy a GWR (that’s today’s GWR!) set single to Banbury, then, as I originally planned, buy a single to Dorridge, where most Chiltern Railways Birmingham trains call, my TfWM Network ticket being valid from there.

Although my GWR ticket was valid on the Cross Country service, I didn’t fancy travelling on a Friday evening crowded Voyager, so I thought that I would catch a GWR stopping service. These only run roughly every two hours, so I checked on realtime trains to see when the next one was, hoping to have time for another pint of Sussex Best but………the next one was due in twenty minutes, just enough time to dash to the station, so off I went down George Street, quickly stopping to snatch this photo of a City Sightseeing Wright Electroliner leaving Gloucester Green bus station, illustrating that even Tour buses in Oxford are going electric!

As I approached the station, my watch told me that I only had around three minutes before the train departed, so I had no time to photograph any of the buses that terminated outside and went straight in, finding a queue at the ticket office come information desk so I resorted to the ticket machine. Now, in my opinion, as a very rough rule of thumb that can’t be applied everywhere, as each train operator has their own design of ticket machine, such machines fall into three basic generations. The first generation seems to have been very much a work in development and was ultimately replaced by a second generation, which was much improved, able to sell things like Rover tickets and so on. Then, in more recent years, at a time when, as I’ve mentioned often in these blogs, there has been threats to the future of ticket offices and a greater encouragement to use things like smart phone apps to buy your tickets, a new generation of machines have come forward which, in my opinion, are unnecessaraly complex, needing things like the exact time you wish to travel, fooling people into thinking they need to stick with a particular train and so on. Another factor, which caught me out at Kidderminster the other month (see blog “Worcestershire & Warwickshire”) is a tendency to offer only the off peak return on the screen, then having to dig deeper for a single, which I had to do on this screen, finding an off peak single for £8.20, only around 20p cheaper than the off peak return! But this stated it was an off peak single (off peak singles! Really?) and a £14 peak single was below it. My train was due to depart at 17.54, would this require a peak single? Once upon a time, the machine would state the restrictions on the off peak fare but now, it was look on the website…and that 17.54 time was around a minute away! So much for the labour saving ways of the internet world! Do I buy the peak version to be on the safe side? No, the fact that the off peak fare was on display indicated that peak here was a morning restriction, and I didn’t fancy being ripped off by the railways today, so I plumbed for the off peak. If I were to have any hassle off the guard, I would argue that this was the first ticket that I saw and, as it was offered,  should be valid!

I went through the barrier and saw the train, 165 119 pulling in om Platform One, on the other side of the footbridge the service having reached here calling all stations from Didcot Parkway. So I legged it across the bridge and fortunately joined the last few boarding the front carriage of the train.

My fellow nearby travellers were a group who spoke with American accents, who had obviously been working in some sort of white collar job in Oxford and were obviously looking forward to the weekend, sharing a bottle of wine between them!

This is a lovely stretch of line which can be appreciated far more on the all stop train than can be done from a speeding Voyager. There are three stations between Oxford & Banbury, nice little country stops that complement the rural scene best illustrated on an evening like this by the poem that the final episode of Oxford based “Inspector Morse” was named after, “The Remorseful Day” which talks of sanguine skies and so on, summing up this early summer’s evening perfectly. Wish I could quote it the way John Thaw did but you get my drift?

The train was comfortably loaded, dropping off a few at each of the stops, Tackley and Heyford before meeting the Chiltern Line from London Marylebone at Aynho Junction, after which was Kings Sutton, actually just in Northamptonshire and the least used station of that county. Soon after, we arrived at Banbury;

No one had checked tickets on the trian but, for some reason, the barrier at the station rejected my ticket! The guy at the side checked said ticket and I thought, here we go, ticket not valid but no, he just said that there was an error in the ticket coding so let me through!

As I’d arrived here earlier than originally planned, I decided to go and have a pint at the Ye Olde Reindeer anyhow, if I could remember the way after all these year. But an aid was at hand, for outside the station, I found Kevin! For the delays to the S4 meant that he was unable to reach Birmingham in time for the Scout meeting (he’s a Scout leader) that he’d planned to attend, so he’d popped to the station to see if I’d emerged from it, which, of course, I had! So we walked to the pub and enjoyed a couple of pints of Hook Norton’s Off The Hook pale ale, which again, went down incredibly smoothly whilst we chated mainly about buses! Kevin told me that his plan tommorow was to catch the Stagecoach 488 to Chipping Norton, then ride Pulhams extended 801 through to Cheltenham!

I decided to head back to the station to catch the 20.21 train, having already bought my ticket for this from the machine at the station when I arrived, the Banbury-Dorridge single costing £15.20, which Kevin said was around £3 cheaper than the £18 single through to Birmingham, so I’d saved something with it!

168 214 took me swiftly through the countryside, calling at Leamington & Warwick Parkway before reaching Dorridge, where I noticed West Midlands Railways 172 101 on a Worcester Foregate Street waiting in an adjacent platform, which I thought about catching through to The Hawthorns, but my train’s doors closed before I could get off. Still, I decided to get off at Solihull and catch 172 101 there, enjoying around ten minutes peace and quiet sitting on a former (original) GWR bench on this fairly unaltered former GWR station before 172 101 turned up, it’s Chiltern moquetted seats giving away that this was one of Chiltern’s four Class 172 units that had transferred to join the larger West Midlands Railways Class 172 fleet. A pleasant, all stop run through Birmingham Moor Street & Snow Hill saw me arrive back at The Hawthorns, sadly just missing a tram, leading to me having to wait around twelve minutes for CAF 100 39 to take me home. Another grand day exploring our rural bus services!