Two Incidents

Today I arrived at Paignton Bus Station to start work. I was due out, heading for Newton at 10:55. My bus had the Bus Working Number Papa 10. All number 12 buses have a call sign between Papa 1 and Papa 20. Also they run in order Papa 9 would be in front of me and Papa 11 behind me.
It first began to dawn on me that there was a problem when I noticed the queue for the 12 was getting fairly big and it was 11:00. Since there are no road works in the Bay ( a small piece of history there) the buses should not be running so late. Then a bus turned up and I walked over to it to change places with the driver. He indicated that he was not coming off and I asked him his running number. 7, three buses before mine. What was going on. Then the Controller came out and explained that a low loader had come from the Ring Road onto the main Paignton to Brixham Raod and got stuck. Big Time.

He was there over 2 hours and all the buses coming from Brixham were running up to 40 minutes late. This was on the hottest day of the year so far and town was full of holiday makers and foreign language students. Fortunatly most were down on the beach enjoying the sun (1) and sand and traffic was fairly light. Once the low loader had been moved it only took a couple of hours to get all the buses back on time.

Then in the afternoon over the radio one of the drivers reported a serious accident near Torr Railway Station. Traffic moving into Torquay had to be diverted and would have missed out stops at the College and the Coach Station. Buses going out of town were getting through with only a slight delay. When I went past the crash scene a black car had been cut open and some one was being put into an ambulance. No other details as yet.

Then even later in the afternoon as I was just about to go into Paignton to hand over to an other driver, Control informed me that due to problems caused by the crash my replacement driver would be 25 mins late in Paignton and that I would have to transfer my passengers going beyond Paignton to the next bus, a wait for them of 10 minutes and a wait for those passengers in Brixham of an extra 15 minutes. Well I don't mind a little over time so I took the bus to Brixham and back. One passenger who had heard the above conversation gave me a big thank you when he got off, which was nice.

(1) A short message to all our Foreign Language Students. On very hot, sunny days in England, Sun Block 30 if you are out in the sun for more than 20 mins. Some of our visitors from the Mediterranean seem to think the sun isn't strong up here in the North.