R is for Reading Buses

Saturday 12th August 2023

It’s up there with Nottingham City Transport as one of the UK’s top bus companies. Reading Buses has long been admired for offering a high quality bus service with first class marketing with active support from a pro public transport Reading Borough Council, which also owns the business.

It’s also benefitted for more than 15 years from having three Chief Executive Officers with a wealth of bus industry experience and an undoubted passion, dedication and enthusiasm for buses in James Freeman, Martijn Gilbert and current incumbent Robert Williams.

The company was transformed during James’s tenure followed by Martijn adding yet more positive developments and an ethos that’s continued to the present day top dog Robert together with significant expansion over the last decade or so. The company now runs buses in Newbury (using the Newbury & District name) …

… as well as Bracknell, Maidenhead and Slough (using the Thames Valley brand) following the acquisition of Courtney Buses …

… and operates to both Heathrow Airport and London Victoria following the take over of First Berkshire’s involvement in Green Line.

A fleet of new ADL Enviro 400 buses was introduced from the end of last month on to its routes 702 and 703 with new London Line and Flightline branding under an overarching Windsor Express name.

But it’s the company’s operations in its home town of Reading which have rightly earned it a reputation for excellent service provision and which I was delighted to sample once again a couple of weeks ago.

You don’t have to be in the town very long before appreciating the colourful smart appearance and positive impression the buses create. No insipid livery that merges into the background here. No corporate national identity that means nothing to local people.

In Reading you’ll find a superb colour coded network of bus routes which is replicated on the buses on each route…

… bus stop plates…

… posters in town centre bus shelters explaining where to catch your bus…

… a bus map …

… and printed timetable leaflets.

It’s full of best practice bus service marketing and not a wrongly branded bus to be found on the wrong route.

The network itself has expanded over the years to match the town’s expansion but some traditional long standing routes still continue today as they ran when I was at university in the town fifty years ago and even back beyond that to trolleybus days; not least the company’s flagship route 17 which still runs between Wokingham Road,Three Tuns via the town centre to Tilehurst, Water Tower.

In my Uni days newly delivered Bristol VR ‘Jumbo’ buses (complete with Videmat image creating ticket machines for passengers to use) had just been introduced on the route. Real ‘state of the art’ of their day.

Nowadays the route is operated by smart purple coloured gas powered Scania Enviro 400 MMC City buses.

It’s Reading’s most frequent bus route at every 10 minutes and can get very busy. At one time it ran even more frequently but post pandemic, frequencies have had to be reduced on a number of routes.

It’s always been my favourite route for its claim to fame of doing a full 360 degree turn in the busy roads at both termini exactly as it did in trolleybus days. At Tilehurst by the Water Tower…

… and at Wokingham Road by the fire station.

The company has been running gas powered buses for a number of years and the Reading fleet now has around a third of its fleet of both single and double decks out of a total of approximately 150 running on biomethane. The Reading fleet is dominated by double decks from both Scania and Alexander Dennis with a smattering of single decks and one lone Mercedes Sprinter used on the Buzz branded route 42.

Aside from the new buses for Green Line and some recent purchases for Thames Valley it’s noticeable there’s been something of a pause in new bus investment for Reading no doubt reflecting the financial challenges brought on by the pandemic.

Back to the network, and aside from the main east-west route 17 already mentioned, the company’s other top ranking routes are the 5 and 6 both running every 12 minutes to the south (Whitley Wood)…

… while route 26 runs every 15 minutes to the west (Calcot).

The greenwave branded route 50 to Green Park also runs every 15 minutes as does the Mereoak Park & Ride route 600, which since the pandemic is the only Park & Ride car park now in use, located just off the A33 south of the M4 junction.

However, confusingly this isn’t properly signposted for motorists coming from a distance. Instead signs point to the former Park & Ride site by the football stadium which is no longer in use. Something the Borough Council needs to sort out. The former site at Winnersh, south east of Reading also hasn’t been used since the pandemic but there is a site called Thames Valley just off the London Road east of the town where a route 300 shuttles every half an hour via the Royal Berkshire Hospital to the Mereoak site.

Other bus routes in the town run every 20 minutes (11, 15, 16, 33 – all in the west and 21 – to Earley in the south with extras to the University in term time) or half hourly (22, 23, 24, 27/29 to the Caversham area north of the town and orange 13, 14 in the Woodley area east of the town supplemented by hourly journeys on each of 19A/19B/19C to make 20 minutely where combined).

Routes 9 and 10 also run half hourly to Whitley Wood and Kennet Island respectively.

Finally for the network, there are out of town routes some of which have also been inherited from First Bus in years past. Route 1 (above) runs half hourly to Thatcham and Newbury…

… routes 2/2A run half hourly to Mortimer…

… route 3 runs every 20 minutes to Arborfield Green with hourly projections to Wokingham…

… routes 4/X4 also run every 20 minutes to Winnersh and Bracknell

and route 25 runs hourly to Peppard Common.

As with my niggle-less travels around Nottingham, I found the same as I sampled a number of routes in Reading. I was slightly disappointed the Travel Shop in the Broad Street Mall shopping centre in St Mary’s Butts is closed on Saturday, the day when I was in town…

… and all the more frustrating to see the lovely collection of colourful timetable leaflets on display just itching to be browsed through…

… but as you can see from the earlier photograph I was able to pick up copies of leaflets for many routes on board buses as I travelled round the town.

The company’s information box on the plaza at the front of Reading Station is also now closed although there’s a network map, ticket prices and details of where to catch your bus in the town centre as you approach it from the station which I saw many people consulting as they arrived.

There was a time when a timetable leaflet rack was sited in the station itself just by the ticket gates which was always a useful spot to pick up copies.

As already mentioned, Reading has benefitted from a very pro public transport local authority overseeing extensive bus priority measures in the town which has helped the bus company enormously.

The area around Reading Station has been completely transformed over the last couple of decades with much better facilities for pedestrians at the expense of buses being further away. Whereas once many bus routes were all within easy access of the station, some are now quite a distance away – and it always intrigues me that whereas route 17 picks up and sets down in Friar Street, the less busy buses to Woodley have prime spot right by the station itself.

The most famous bus lane in the country can be found in King’s Road between Cemetery Junction and the old Huntley & Palmers site where a revolutionary (at the time) contra-flow bus lane was installed enabling trolleybuses to avoid diverting along London Road when an early one-way system was implemented.

Reading’s ticket prices give good value and include the usual facilities of buying more cheaply on an app. The company was one of the first to offer discounted fares to young adults up to 18 years of age…

… but I was intrigued by the claim Reading has the “UK’s lowest bus fares” which is a tad ironic as I couldn’t see a reference anywhere that the company is taking part in the DfT’s £2 maximum single fare promotion.

£4.50 for an all day ticket is certainly a great value deal as promoted on the rear of the bus shown above and on the listing by the entrance door, but it’s puzzling that on the company’s website it’s still showing the price as £3.50 (£3.40 on the app) which I suspect hasn’t been updated since the increase last September.

However, since publishing this online Andrew has commented that the current all day price is indeed £3.50 with the £1 reduction being funded by the Council’s Bus Service Improvement Plan, so it’s the bus rears ‘behind’ (!) not the website.

The website is another excellent product from the Passenger stable with clear identification on the home page of all the main information one might want as well as vehicle tracking, pdf maps and timetables and much much more.

I always enjoy visiting Reading especially for personal nostalgic reasons with fond memories of my three years stay in the town fifty years ago.

I still remember the day Noel Edmonds came into town with the Radio 1 Roadshow (this was the early seventies) and rightly told everyone listening Reading was famous for three Bs … biscuits, bulbs and beer. Sadly all three of the town’s major employers at that time, Huntley & Palmers, Sutton Seeds and Courage have all since left, but I remember thinking back then Noel should have added a fourth B – buses – and pleasingly Reading Buses has not only very much survived and prospered but is still running a great bus service across the town and beyond.

Roger French

Previous AtoZ blogs: Avanti West Coast, Blackpool Transport, Chiltern Railways, Delaine Buses, Ensignbus, Faresaver, Grand Central, Hull Trains, Ipswich Buses, JMB Travel, Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire, Lynx, Isle of Man Transport Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Nottingham City Transport, (London) Overground, Preston Bus.

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