So we've got Mr Souter to blame for the lack of a Southampton bus station!
Not so much the bus station, but famously he sold the depot for more than he paid for the entire company, so I suspect he would be very happy to take the blame for that!
Interesting, thanks for that. Incidentally was the 52 (and its successor, the 7) 100% Marchwood Motorways? I ask as I remember when the 52 went hourly to Bishops Waltham (late 90s?) some Bishops Waltham shorts were operated by VRs while the 30, 32 and 52 were otherwise worked by a distinctive type of single-decker (sorry, no idea what model) and minibuses. Perhaps the VRs were off the 18?
Yes, I think there were odd journeys that were operated by SBL rather than MM. Anything with a VR would definitely have been SBL - MM never ran those I don't think. The single deckers would most likely have been their Optare Deltas - a superb, game changing design in my view.
IIRC there was a similar arrangement with Brijan Tours of Botley which ran various double deckers and minibuses mostly for school and contract work, using blueline livery and having the effect of expanding the Blueline brand so it looked like an even bigger operation than it actually was.
Yes, this is true. Although as I remember, the key difference was that the MM routes were commercial routes where it suited MM to pay SBL a franchise fee to take care of all the marketing, publicity etc as it would give them a greater prominence in the market than they could achieve running in their own brand (in the same way that most high street franchises - McDonalds, Subway etc - work), whereas the Brijan routes were council contracts that were subcontracted to Brijan to take advantage of their lower costs.
On another "historical SBL" matter, I remember the re-numbering in May 2003 when many routes were renumbered in a consecutive sequence starting with the 2 (Fair Oak, as now). However there was no route 1 at that time. I'd presume the intention was to renumber the 47 as the 1 in 2003, but for whatever reason, it was never done until Bluestar was launched.
No, the 2003 exercise was all about redesigning the Eastleigh network as part of what was defined as a 'Quality Network' partnership with Hampshire - essentially pooling the commercial revenue and subsidy to create something greater than its parts (and also saw the introduction of the Mini Pointer Darts to replace Ivecos and update the image). As part of this, half of the 15 minute headway between Eastleigh and North Stoneham became the 3, and the other half - the 48 - was renumbered the 2 so that the combined local service would be the 2 and 3 rather than the 3 and 48 - much more intuitive for customers. I don't specifically know why 1 wasn't used - it was before my time - but the 47 was never part of the exercise.
There was never an intention to renumber 47 until I arrived in 2004 and we decided to rebrand the Southampton interurban network as 'Bluestar' and we wanted a nice simple numbering scheme. Normally, renumbering established routes is something to be done with great care, but as this was a complete relaunch, we decided to go for it, with Bluestar 1, 2, 3, 4 etc to replace the 47, 2, 26 and 15 and we needed that simplicity to get across the core Bluestar concepts of frequent, simple and reliable.
It was a convenient coincidence that the 2 had already been done, so it was obvious then that the 47 should be Bluestar 1. It was internally very controversial - it was made very clear to me that it had been the 47 since the 1920s and I I changed it at my peril - but it is a rare case study of where it sometimes does work to change a number, delivering as it did immense patronage growth and really forming the cornerstone of a network that has changed very little (apart from having more added) to this day.
