Young bus professionals in Tyne & Wear

Tuesday 4th March 2025

I had the pleasure and privilege of co-hosting another fascinating conference for young professionals working in the bus industry on Wednesday and Thursday last week in Newcastle. It was one of the twice-a-year conferences held at various locations around the country to encourage and inspire young managers as well as share good experience and best practice. As always, the event had an engaging agenda with some great speakers sharing their experience and insights.

As per our usual practice, we kicked off with two afternoon visits taking a look at one of the new Class 555 trains recently delivered in Tyne & Wear at the Metro’s new training facility in the former South Shields station before it was relocated slightly west alongside a new interchange/bus station.

Due to logistics, numbers on this visit had to be limited to around a dozen attendees but it proved to be a fascinating insight and experience for those lucky enough to attend, seeing these impressive new Stadler built trains now being slowly introduced on to the network – more in a future blog.

From South Shields we took a busy Stagecoach electric Yutong single deck bus on route E1 down the coast to Sunderland…

… where we met up with the rest of the conference attendees…

… to take a look around the new electric charging facilities being installed there.

It was also interesting to see the autonomous minibus due to begin trials on a shuttle service between Park Lane Interchange and Sunderland Royal Hospital in the city centre this month – more in a future blog.

Back in Newcastle that evening we were fortunate to have North East Mayor Kim McGuinness as our guest speaker.

Kim is very much looking forward to “taking back control” of the region’s public transport seeing many advantages of aligning transport policies with her other responsibilities including housing and regeneration, education, skills and training, housing and planning including mayoral development areas. She was particularly keen to focus on solving the problem of child poverty as a priority during her term of office.

Previously Police and Crime Commissioner for Northumbria, Kim was elected to the new role of Mayor for the Combined Authority last May, Her area covers seven diverse local authorities: County Durham, Gateshead, Newcastle, North Tyneside, Northumberland, South Tyneside and Sunderland providing a contrast of deep rural areas and densely populated urban areas.

Conference delegates took the opportunity to ask some very pertinent questions which showed the Mayor, perhaps not surprisingly, is not across the detail of what makes for excellent bus services, for example taking responsibility for implementing bus priority measures, but her interest and commitment to improve bus provision was welcome to hear.

Such detail is much more within the purview of Cathy Massarella, managing director of Nexus who was our first speaker on Thursday morning.

Nexus is both a transport operator – Metro and the North and South Shields ferry – as well as being the transport authority for the Combined Authority area.

Her role is to implement the Mayor’s manifesto commitment for “better buses” and it was encouraging to hear her pragmatically explain the type of bus reform to be pursued will be that which achieves “the best option for the customer” indicating lessons will be learned from experience in Greater Manchester.

With a timescale needing to incorporate assessments, independent audits, consultation and mobilisation as the reform progresses it’s inevitable it will take until 2028/2029 to achieve.

Next speaker was Phil Cummins, engineering director of Arriva.

It made a nice change to hear from one of the industry’s most senior engineers and hear his take on the unstoppable move towards introducing emission free vehicles, not least his assessment of the challenges of introducing hydrogen based on experience in Liverpool.

Phil also outlined the difficulties of installing electrical charging facilities in a timely manner when power supply in the vicinity of a bus garage is restricted until costly enhancements are made to the infrastructure.

Phil is a time served PCV mechanic from 1988 followed by various supervisory and management positions before becoming Head of Engineering for MTL North in 1997 being responsible for nine depots and 995 vehicles. Arriva acquired MTL North in 2000 leading to Phil working in various parts of the country including north Wales and Yorkshire but now has responsibility for engineering across the whole of Arriva in England and Wales.

It’s always great to see our regular attending young managers take the opportunity given at each conference to make a short presentation about their career to date and this time we heard from George Sloan who’s had a meteoric rise with Stagecoach and is now Operations Director at Stagecoach West and Oxford Tube.

George won the prestigious award of Young Bus Manager of the Year at last November’s UK Bus Awards and hearing his presentation it’s not hard to see why – a very enthusiastic dynamic young manager who now has significant responsibilities and still at a young age.

It’s very encouraging to see.

It was then time for the ever popular inter-active session when all delegates are able to get involved in discussing a current topic and report back. This session was introduced by Andrew McGuinness, Regional Manager for the Confederation of Passenger Transport in the North of England.

This time, attendees were encouraged to put together a two minute TikTok style video for sending to the Mayor pointing out what is good and not so good about integration between bus and train in the North East and show the challenges she faces in the years ahead.

After some discussion in break out groups it was then out into Newcastle city centre to see what examples would be best to feature, including the City’s rather down-at-heel coach station as well as poor signage highlighting buses as rail passengers exit Central Station – with an out of date, hard to find, poster.

After lunch we heard from another inspirational young manager who’s set up his very own bus company, Northstar.

I featured Dan Graham’s amazing journey in a blog last October and it was great to hear him enthusiastically share his career experience as well as the challenges and lessons he’s learned in setting up Northstar.

Still under 30, it really is so encouraging to see and hear of Dan’s success and I know those attending were rightly very impressed as he related his story.

Our final speaker was Anna Courtier from First Bus, who also leads the Northern Region section of Women in Bus and Coach, which was the subject of her presentation – to brief our young attendees on this initiative which aims to “challenge and eliminate barriers currently faced by women in the profession ….. create a more inclusive service that is representative of customers …. help to make sure women have equal access to a career in the industry and a workplace designed around their needs.”

Over the many years I’ve been involved in the Young Bus Professionals it’s been heartening to see more women attending and taking key roles in the industry. But there’s still much more to be done to balance up the genders, not least when “more than half of bus customers are women …. but …. only around 10% of the people who work in the bus industry are women.”

To round off the conference we were entertained and enthralled playing the eight two-minute videos compiled in not much more than an hour before lunch. And, as at our last conference in Cambridge last autumn when we began this method of feedback, the delegates didn’t disappoint with some excellent and engaging videos which I am sure the Mayor will find interesting and eye-opening.

I’d had the pleasure of jointly hosting the conference on Thursday with David Conway from Nottingham City Transport. A former attender at our conferences David is now Head of Operations at the multi award winning bus company and Alex Hornby, now Commercial and Customer Director at Northern, kindly introduced the Mayor on Wednesday evening.

A fantastic couple of days once again and it’s always good to see such positive feedback from those attending as they left the hotel for their journey home.

Roger French

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