I'm pretty sure Arriva ran it for a time and I also remember being on one of the blue liveried buses with Cheshire County Council livery which I'm pretty sure transferred from Arriva to Bakerbus after the contract re-award which had a plate below the front window with an Arriva logo on it.
The Arriva plates didn't even get removed when the buses were repainted in Cheshire Connect colours.
Bakerbus only used one of the Blue 'Cheshire Bus' Darts on the Macclesfield-Knutsford route. The other bus on the 27 route was usually a yellow Volvo B6, which sometimes got swapped for a smaller unit for the off-peak services and back again to the V6 in time for the evening peak.
Bakerbus also continued to run the Sunday only 27 Macclesfield-Tatton Park service until the end of last Summer, the route has now been withdrawn.
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
I still would be pleased to receive an answer to this query that I raised, even if that service did run under a different service number in past days.
I'm not 100% certain on that one.
Starline definitely had 27 Macclesfield-Knutsford, 288 Knutsford-Wilmslow-Altrincham and 300 Knutsford Circular. They also had some village routes, which North Western were quick to dispose of, the village routes varied between days. One route was Sandbach-Holmes Chapel-Knutsford-Rostherne-Altrincham that ran two days a week, another was something like Northwich-Lach Dennis-Lower Peover-Knutsford and there would have been another one for High Legh which didn't use to be served by the 289 route.
The Sandbach-Altrincham route was subsequently operated by a few different operators: Bakerbus, Whitegate Travel and Roadliner. The latter used oversized vehicles for a twice a week village route and pulled out citing that there's hardly any passengers. Rostherne certainly lost it's bus service altogether. I'm not sure if the E69 route came as a result of that service being revised or whether it was a service that existed alongside it.
Warrington Borough Transport took over the Lower Peover and High Legh connections and ran it as a through service (number 47) to Warrington at well above the minimum level. When they asked for an increased subsidy for the Lower Peover and High Legh village connections, Cheshire CC refused the request and the route finished up with Tomlinson Travel and cut back to the minimum service level.