For the second part* of his look at trends in bus interiors, ANDY RIGBY considers how the industry has upped its game on premium interurban routes and sees that these ideas are filtering down to some of the next tier of services
* Part One last month
The focus on bus interiors has seen a return — particularly for longer interurban routes — of something closer to the dual purpose singledeckers of past decades, but often with double-deckers today.
With its Gold services (see Christopher Carter’s features this month and last), Stagecoach offers high-backed leather seats, a classy blue and gold interior (later with free WiFi) to provide faster and more comfortable services capable of attracting car users. It also provides existing passengers with greater comfort and offers a competitive advantage over other operators’ more conventional services. It has not confined this approach to the slowly growing range of Gold routes. The X24 express started early last year between Sunderland and Newcastle provides an alternative to the Tyne & Wear Metro.
This uses tri-axle 13.7m Scania OmniLink K270UB6s made redundant after the 55/X55 (Dunfermline-Edinburgh), for which they were bought new, was converted to coache…
