Trentbarton

Trentbarton is a bus operator based in Heanor, Derbyshire. It is a subsidiary of the Wellglade Group.

History


In October 1913 Trent Motor Traction Company was founded and commenced operating a bus service between Derby and Ashbourne. In November 1913 a second service commenced to Stapleford. By 1925 services were operating from Derby, Loughborough and Nottingham. As services expanded the business grew to seven depots.

During the 1930s some 52 smaller operators were bought out. In August 1949 Trent Motor Traction Company began to operate some services in partnership with Derby Corporation. In 1958 following the opening of the A52 motorway an express service commenced between Derby and Nottingham. In 1969 the company became part of the National Bus Company.

As part of the privatisation of the bus industry Trent was sold in a management buyout. In 1989 the business of neighbouring Barton Transport was purchased and placed into a separate legal entity even though both subsidiaries combined their operations on a day-to-day basis. The separate Trent and Barton brands were brought together as 'trentbarton' in 2005.

Trentbarton maintains a 6% shareholding in First in Leicester.

Services
Trentbarton operate services from Loughborough, Ashbourne, Burton upon Trent, Chesterfield, Derby, Ilkeston, Mansfield, and Nottingham.

Many of the routes are branded with their own bus livery and name, with the route brand name registered as the service number. A set of services were originally branded rainbow but the rainbow brand has been dropped from four of the five services; they are a group of frequent, high density services radiating from Nottingham to its outer suburbs from every 6–12 mins.

On 24 July 2011, indigo became the UK's first '24 hours a day – 7 days a week' commercial bus service and up until March 2012 it operated to East Midlands Airport and Loughborough when that section of the route was replaced by a revised Skylink Nottingham service which provides buses up to every 30 minutes to East Midlands Airport, Skylink also offers fast journeys between Long Eaton and Nottingham (avoiding Beeston bus station) as well as continuing on from the Airport to Loughborough hourly through the day Monday – Saturday.

The company runs 'Connection' services from Nottingham to the suburbs of Calverton, Cotgrave, Keyworth and Ruddington. A few services with conventional numbering still remain around local areas; the 23 in Ilkeston is one example.

In Derby, Trentbarton run some urban services, such as the non-stop 'Spondon Flyer' service, and 'the Mickleover' and 'the Allestree'. There are then a number of longer distance services for example 'swift' to Uttoxeter and 'the sixes' to Belper and Matlock with their unusual numbering system: 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4 and 6.X. 'the villager' services run south to Burton on Trent with the numbering system, V1, V2, V3 and V4 and a number of services run north towards Ilkeston and Heanor such as the 'black cat' and 'H1'.

Trentbarton also operate a number of express services around the East Midlands. These include:
 * 'red arrow' service from Nottingham to Derby
 * 'pronto' (operated jointly with Stagecoach) from Nottingham and Mansfield to Chesterfield
 * X38 (operated jointly with Arriva Derby) from Derby to Burton on Trent

Services such as the Bingham 'xprss' and 'club class' run direct into Nottingham from its outer suburbs.

Many of the more popular services within the network operate through to around 03:00 on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

High Peak
In April 2012 Trentbarton entered a 50/50 joint venture with Centrebus. This saw Trentbarton's Buxton operation combined with Bowers Coaches to form High Peak.

The new company operates all services previously run by Bowers Coaches and the Buxton division of Trentbarton, including the Skyline 199 service from Buxton to Stockport and Manchester Airport.and Transpeak from Nottingham through Derby, Belper, Matlock, Bakewell, Buxton and Stockport to Manchester.

Ticketing schemes
In June 2008 Trentbarton introduced 'Mango', a prepaid touchless smartcard system developed in partnership with Init. The system works by having an RFID smartcard with the user 'touching on' at the start of their journey and 'touching off' at the end. This allows for exact fare pricing as your price is calculated by the GPS position of the bus. Users of the 'Mango' card pay 25% less than the normal cash single fare for their journey.

The 'Mango' system was initially tested on the company's Rainbow 4 and Indigo routes. After this proved successful, Trentbarton proceeded to extend the scheme to more of its services.

Fleet
As at November 2012 the fleet consisted of 277 buses.

The company operate a fleet of modern low floor vehicles, most of the fleet is branded for services although a number of buses are in a red livery with various advertisements on advertising Trentbarton products such as their Mango smart card, ZigZag tickets and social media websites.

Depot
Trentbarton operate out of depots in Belper, Derby, Langley Mill, Nottingham and Sutton in Ashfield.