Monday 15 October 2007

Child Tickets

Child explorers, available to anyone under 16 cost £4.00 and can be used on any Stagecoach bus in Devon. Just thought I would mention that before I start.

Anyway, on Sunday I was up in Newton Abbot waiting time. the bus pictured below was also there and as I had 8 minutes I took a few shots. Then back to the bus to load up my passengers, of whom there were three. The rest of the bus station was as deserted of human life as the far side of the Moon. Which is usual for Newton abbot bus station on a Sunday. The three waiting passengers were all teenage boys and the first showed me an explorer ticket. The seconded pretended to look for his ticket while the first boy passed his explorer over to the third boy in a way I have see done more than once or twice before. Do they think we have never had this happen before. The first two then hurried upstairs while the third boy then went through the process of looking for his ticket which he found in due course. Funny it had been folded exactly the same way as the first ticket I had seen.

So I followed him upstairs to where all three were now sitting and asked to see their tickets again. As we all expected they only had two explorers. There was a third ticket but this was a child return to Teighmouth costing £3.35, should have got an explorer. Child return was OK on the 85A but not on the 12. I gave them the option of paying but they decided to get of. All this had taken about 3 minutes which put me a minute late for departure. Not too much of a problem except that from a deserted Newton Abbot 6 more passengers had just beamed in. While they were getting on another 8 or ten arrived. I managed to leave 6 minutes late. So if your bus is sometime late this is one of the many possible reasons.

As I pulled out of the station the human population went back down to Zero.



2 comments:

didbygraham said...

Nice to see the photo of the VR - which was doing a bit of a local tour around some of the old devon general routes.
Stagecoach have just painted a Trident in the same livery which looks very smart. I guess at some time it will appear on the 12!

Budgie said...

You can see some more shots of this on James' flickr page; http://www.flickr.com/photos/lfj862w/