Book Review: X1 Southend to London

Sunday 24th August 2025

Richard Delahoy has kindly sent me a copy of his recently published book about the famous route X1 which plied between Southend and London in the 1980s. It’s sub-title ‘The rise and fall of a deregulated phenomenon’ neatly encapsulates the book’s substantial content.

Richard has not only put together a truly fascinating account of this remarkable service, which began on express coach deregulation day on 6th October 1980, but across what is an incredible 284 page volume, covers every conceivable detail about the route including 15 appendices and 200 footnotes with explanatory supplementary text.

The book is also packed full of photographs (254 in all) and countless images of faretables, timetables, publicity, maps, and tickets from Richard’s extensive collection of everything connected with the service.

If ever Richard fancies a go on Mastermind there’s no doubt he’d smash it by choosing The History of Route X1 as his specialist subject. It is absolutely incredible how he has been able to capture every facet of this intriguing story.

And I hasten to add it’s definitely not the case this book is only for ‘X1 aficionados’. Richard’s very readable and engaging account shows how the story is full of intrigue and surprise at how things developed. Early experience in the first couple of years had the new route written off as a complete failure yet within three years it’s expansion in response to growing demand was so rapid it was almost out of control and threatened to bring the whole company down. Richard observes the words of ‘Mr X1 himself’, the late Derek Giles, “I’ve created this monster that I can’t control”.

Indeed, the book is appropriately dedicated to Derek Giles, Southend Transport’s revered Traffic Superintendent, and rightly so. As Richard observes “without him there would have been no X1 story to tell”.

It’s taken Richard seven years to put this book together. I’m not surprised when you see the contents.

As well as interviews with many of the key people involved, Richard gives an explanatory background to the pre 1980 aspirations of Southend Transport as well as what happened between 2002, after the company pulled out of the service, and 2016 when others who had tried having a go and finally threw in the towel.

The X1 story begins with Derek Giles’s long held view there was a market to be had for carrying passengers between Southend and London, particularly to Heathrow Airport. The 1980 deregulation of journeys over 30 miles was the impetus for him to persuade the company to start such a service.

A similar interest from Derek’s friend and colleague, Mike Russell, over at Reading Transport led to the service initially being jointly operated with through journeys running between Southend and Reading and a journey time getting on for four hours.

But thanks to traffic delays along the route as well as differences over fares policies and a lack of passengers, it wasn’t a success. Within two years both companies agreed to develop their own separate services with Reading’s Goldline branded route running as far east as Aldgate and Southend’s X1 reaching the coveted Heathrow Airport.

It was the rail strikes of 1982/83 which transformed route X1 into Britain’s most frequent express route as the company strove to meet the burgeoning demand from dissatisfied rail commuters fed up with the alternative provided by what had become dubbed ‘The Misery Line’ into Fenchurch Street. More and more buses were added to the peak vehicle requirement to meet the unceasing growing demand such that whereas the route began with Southend providing four vehicles (and Reading had four) on eight daily journeys in 1980, by January 1987 Southend was turning out 56 coaches on 67 journeys. It was overwhelming the company’s resources.

The finances of all those vehicles simply didn’t stack up with so much of the market being peak based and little for the coaches to do during the day. Richard describes the scene at Aldgate bus station on a typical afternoon in February 1987 between 16:30 and 18:15 when 29 blue and yellow coaches could be seen picking up commuters every five minutes on a variety of designated route variations using numbers X10, X11, X21, X39, X31 and X41 in addition to the original X1.

It couldn’t last, and the service began a slow but inevitable decline from that 1987 peak not least when serious competition from Thamesway’s City Saver service began in 1992. Eventually the two rivals came together to run a joint service which was branded under the Green Line banner using route numbers in the familiar 7xx series.

But improvements to the rail service and worsening traffic congestion saw passenger numbers decline further with First (Thamesway’s owners) pulling out in 2001 followed by Arriva (by then, owners of Southend Transport) in 2002. Stephensons had a go with a limited replacement until 2008 followed by Swallow Coaches, Snowdrop Travel and finally Drive With Neo all of which is chronicled in Richard’s narrative and appendices.

It’s a story offering huge lessons which are still applicable today particularly with Bus Service Improvement Funded new bus routes taking to the road in many parts of the country. There are also parallels with the London Oxford situation where Oxford Bus withdrew from the heavily ‘bussed’ corridor in January 2020, albeit the significant market for travel from London to Oxford as well as large numbers of students helps sustain an attractive off-peak service in a way that just just wasn’t the case for Southend.

The book explains the how and why after a difficult start, an exciting new bus service rose to dizzying heights before falling and completely failing. Richard has sought to offer an honest, objective and at times critical assessment of the decisions that saw the service expand to those unsustainable heights and almost bankrupt the undertaking.

It’s well worth a read.

The book costs just £30 offering excellent value for the enormous and comprehensive coverage of the subject matter. Richard has self published it and copies can be obtained directly from him from this website for £35, including postage and packing. You won’t be disappointed.

Roger French

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