Midland Bluebird Limited Scania L113CRL/Wright Axcess-Ultralow

The buses of Scotland - FifeFirst

 

This particular bus was new as Midland Bluebird 578 in October 1996. However its claim to fame for the purposes of this article is that it was then transferred to fellow Firstbus company Lowland Omnibues Limited (still numbered 578) in May 1997 for use on "FifeFirst" services.

 

You may struggle to recall FifeFirst. It was a short lived venture by Firstbus to extend competition with Stagecoach into Fife which barely lasted a few years despite a promising start. However it owes its very existence to Stagecoach’s decision to launch an invasion of Glasgow against Strathclyde’s Buses.

 

Stagecoach had made no secret to its desire to gain a foothold in Glasgow, which had some of the best bus operating territory anywhere. At deregulation in 1986, it launched Magicbus which competed with Strathclyde’s Buses and Kelvin Scottish too, although the latter was only a limited competition. Magicbus soon carved out a useful niche in Glasgow but opportunities for expansion of it were limited. It looked at purchasing Kelvin Central Buses - the merged Kelvin and Central Scottish - to expand its presence in Glasgow as part of the privatisation of the Scottish Bus Group but when it saw the books of that company at the time it passed.

 

A second opportunity arose when news broke about Strathclyde’s Buses being potentially sold to its management and employees. Stagecoach lobbied hard that it should be allowed to bid for the company as well and went as far as to sell Magicbus to the more secure by this stage Kelvin Central. This would remove any possible competition concerns but in the end, Strathclyde passed to the employee/management ownership. This meant Stagecoach exited Glasgow for the time being.

 

The purchase of Western Buses in 1994 gave Stagecoach a way back into Glasgow after these false starts.. It announced at the end of 1994 that it was setting up a Stagecoach Glasgow subsidiary to compete against Strathclyde’s Buses. This looked like a full on bus war and Strathclyde’s Buses went as far as to begin to scour the United Kingdom for vehicles to set up operations competing in Fife and Perth against existing Stagecoach companies there.

 

At the last moment peace broke out and Stagecoach bought a 20% stake in Strathclyde’s Buses parent company, SB Holdings. As part of that transaction some of the buses intended for the new Stagecoach Glasgow operations passed to SB Holdings, the holding company for Strathclyde’s Buses. As it turned out, the Monopolies and Mergers Commission took an interest in the purchase and instructed Stagecoach to sell it, despite Stagecoach’s protests and, ultimately, a court case which it eventually won against the Commission. In the end, the sale was rendered moot when Firstbus purchased SB Holdings and Stagecoach made a handsome profit on the sale.

 

Flash forward to 1997 and Stagecoach again targeted Glasgow. It set up a Stagecoach Glasgow subsidiary with its registered office at Western Buses head office of Sandgate, Ayr, and promised to invest £10 million in services and create 250 jobs with over 100 new buses to be used. Again services to Easterhouse, Castlemilk and East Kilbride were to be run but also to new places such as Cumbernauld, Milton, Pollok and Drumchapel.

 

First retaliated by setting up a new FifeFirst company. This was to be run by Lowland Buses, competing with Stagecoach in Fife. At the same time, SB Holdings subsidiary Kelvin Central Buses began a service in Ayrshire competing against Western Buses on its prestigious former A1 Service. First also invested heavily in its Glasgow fleets.

 

Although there had been many skirmishes since deregulation between two buses companies, this was probably the first case of two super bus groups competing head on. It looked like Stagecoach intended to and was going to carve out a significant part of the Glasgow bus market. At the same time, First was determined to protect some of the most lucrative bus operating territory in the United Kingdom and it was opening up new fronts against Stagecoach with rumours of expanded operations against Stagecoach in Manchester by First owned Greater Manchester Buses North and a new operation against Stagecoach in Newcastle, where First had no presence.

 

However, unlike in Newcastle, where the proposed First operation never happened, in June 1997, the company launched the FifeFirst brand, in order to compete with Stagecoach Fife, who had recently started competing with First's Glasgow operations. Stagecoach had begun short operations between Cumbernauld and Glasgow using its Fife Scottish operations which ran from Fife through Cumbernauld to Glasgow.

 

To hit back, First launched a new operation in Fife. This was with service 56 from Edinburgh to Dunfermline, Cowdenbeath and Ballingry using a combination of 12 new Wright Axcess-Ultralow bodied Scania L113s alongside examples transferred from Lowland Scottish, Midland Scottish and Rider York, all painted in an allover red livery. In addition to these were a few Plaxton Pointer bodied Dennis Dart SLFs. The service mirrored two existing Stagecoach Fife services in part with extensions across to Edinburgh where the terminus was St Andrew’s Bus Station. It was actually quite an innovative service as previously some of the communities it served had to change around Dunfermline to get to Edinburgh. So that gave them useful links and an incentive to use it.

 

As mentioned the buses were painted allover red, the red being the same as the new allover red being applied to First’s new Glasgow fleets. However the red was very historically accurate for the area as following the split of the huge Alexander’s Empire in the 1960s, a red and cream colour scheme was adopted for the Fife region, for the company which later evolved into Fife Scottish and continued up until it was obliterated by Stagecoach’s corporate colours upon its acquisition. The fleet name chosen was FifeFirst and was added in white. Route branding showing were the buses went was also added to the upper panels.

 

A sub-depot was established in Dunfermline, with SMT’s Westfield - by this stage part of Lowland - providing most of the vehicles used. It set fares broadly similar to existing Stagecoach services but its main selling point was its use of accessible vehicles whereas as Stagecoach still used step-entrance Volvo B10M-55/Alexander PS-types.

 

At the time there were rumours of additional services being launched in Fife and it looked as though FifeFirst may go on to be a profitable venture. However it wasn’t to be. Unlike Firsr’s Ayrshire operations which lasted well into the naughties, FifeFirst barely made the millennium. As competition was scaled back in Greater Glasgow, FifeFirst it was felt had became a bit of an outlier, with little room for expansion. Stagecoach by this stage had also introduced accessible vehicles on the competing services, negating First’s main selling point.

 

When First introduced its new corporate livery, it saw the First name gain more prominence with the Fife name relegated to under the driver’s window or beside the entrance. So I suppose technically it became FirstFife then maybe? None of the vehicles were repainted in First’s new livery but technically none qualified to be fair, as they didn’t have the new corporate interiors. But what eventually did for FifeFirst was the closure of St Andrew’s Bus Station in Edinburgh for redevelopment. First took that as an opportunity to cull the service and it lasted until a few days after the closure of the bus station in July 2000. The buses all went back to Midland Bluebird for use in the Falkirk area.

 

So ended an interesting escapade when a former Scottish Bus Group company based in the Scottish Borders, used a depot of another Scottish Bus Grpup company based in Scotland’s Capital City against another Scottish Bus Company’s services in Fife with buses in the colours of what at one stage been the municipal operator in Glasgow. Who says the Scottish Bus industry is boring?

Done