All about me and driving a bus for MK Metro/ARRIVA Milton Keynes

When I’m waiting to start a bus route, and I start to get bored, I start to play out various songs on the Emergency alarm test button on the Dashboard.. See if you can guess what the tune is, nearly everybody in the country knows this song… and yes I already know I’m weird so noone needs to tell me

I got myself a new gadget this week, a Flip Video ultra.. It’s like a pocket video recorder…. So for your delights I videoed my day at work and condensed it into 1 minute and something seconds..

I’ll update with the rest of my week later.

I found an piece on the Bucks Fire Brigade website about an accident involving one of our buses. Don’t really know any details but the pictures are interesting.

It’s more like a block of flats on wheels…

A bit of overkill really for a route where Three passengers on the bus at once is a rush, But It’s all that was available at the garage after I’d broken down yet again yesterday afternoon. At least everyone was guaranteed a seat!

If anybody wants to know the password to view protected posts then Please leave a comment on this post, Making sure you put your email addy in the email field, and I’ll mail it to you

This is a novel experience… I’m blogging direct from my bus!

Anyway, Glad so many of you guessed correctly what was wrong with the picture in my previous post so quickly.. Congratulations! You are now trained fitters. Such a shame that it took so long for our currently employed ones to find the problem.. Or to even listen to me when I told them the fan belt was missing.

15:55 – On the hottest day of the year the Water Temperature warning buzzer starts to go while the bus is in traffic. Pull over, Turn bus off and call fitters. Tell them said buzzer is going and told that there is noone to come out to the bus, So I’ll have to just let it cool down.

16:05 – After seeing all this water being dumped on the road by the bus, I open the engine flap to find that the Fan belt is completely missing. Ring fitters again to tell them this and and it is decided that someone will come out to the bus and fit new fan belt.

18:00 – Fitter arrives with no fan belt. Fitter goes back to depot for fan belt.

19:20 – Fitter returns with number of fan belts, None of them the right size.

19:37 – It is decided that the bus will be towed back to Aylesbury depot, Told by fitter tow truck will be no more than 45 minutes as it’s only in Bedford (13 miles away)

22:20 – Tow Truck arrives.

00:05 – Arrive back at Aylesbury Garage

So thats eight hours and 10 minutes from breaking down to getting back to the depot.. All because of a broken bit of rubber!

Oh and also ARRIVA seems to be a fan belt free zone for some reason, Which is why noone could bring one to the bus. Which got alarm bells ringing the next morning at 9:30 when the same bus was sat there engine running, fan belt replaced, This seemed a bit odd that they’d managed to get one so fast. But anyway, off I went on my usual Park & Ride (Which hadn’t run up until I got to MK at 11am!). 18:00, Same piece of road, Same traffic jam…… Same bloody problem!! Fan belt Shredded!!!!

After going mad, The sensible option was agreed upon by management that a fitter would come out to the bus and I would go home in the fitters van for the Night. (I live in MK, I breakdown in MK but the bus garage is in Aylesbury).

I’m in two minds again about transferring to MK Metro… Some days I wanna do it as soon as possible, Mainly to save money. But then when driving round MK all day, most (not all!) the drivers seem to bloody miserable, I don’t know why, They get paid more than us now! LOL

But after saying all that there’s quite a few miserable drivers at Aylesbury so I suppose it’s no different.. Perhaps it’s just being the “new boy” again… Perhaps I’m just stuck in my little rut and am trying to find excuses not to get out of it… Who knows! :/

Can you spot what’s wrong with this picture??…