Roger French article here -
https://busandtrainuser.com/2026/10/25/marking-40-years-of-deregulated-buses/

Sunday 25th October 2026

To mark tomorrow’s 40th Anniversary of bus deregulation here’s an article I wrote earlier this year for the Omnibus Magazine (the bi-monthly magazine of the Omnibus Society) explaining why deregulation worked so well in Brighton and Hove as well as a number of other British towns and cities. It perhaps also explains why deregulation manifestly didn’t work in other places most of which are now first in the queue for implementing the now available alternative of politically led and publicly controlled ‘franchising’, thanks to previously unheard of generous funding from Government.

.....continues..........

 


"ish" -  a handful of early Monday to Saturday service call at the station in Chippenham having left from Melksham, and a few mid to late afternoon service to Melksham call there.  Otherwise on Monday to Saturday, they don't. All Sunday service to Chippenham will call at the station ON REQUEST, and all outbound services call there.

For Melksham resident "in the know", it works fine as those are the most useful services for rail transfer; what we are short of is evening bus services from (any part) of Chippenham to Melksham.

 
As a dispassionate outsider to Melksham, but temporarily residing here, I have to say that I am becoming a great fan of the Faresaver bus services here.

I have travelled from Melksham Market Place into Bath - service 272 in particular - and to Chippenham - service X34 even goes direct to the railway station there.

I have found those buses to be far more reliable than the sometimes rather flaky train services to and from Melksham.

Chris from (temporarily) Melksham.

 


In just the last couple of years, GoAhead and First have run summer services from Weymouth to and via Lulworth Cove, so close to each other other that they were overtaking each other to pick up at alternate stops.

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In Melksham, we had experience on both the 234 / x34 Chippenham to Trowbridge and Frome, and on the Bath / Melksham / Devizes corridor with D3, 271, 272, 273, x71 and x72.  In both cases, First Bus v Faresaver, and in both cases the service we are left with is Faresaver who have come forward into being a company doing a good job even though they came from a cherry-picking start.  We can and do work with them and (these days) they are far more responsive to the community that than the rail network is.   There are also good people at Wiltshire Council who have helped out county to no longer be the basket case of public transport.   That's not to say that all is perfect on the buses, nor that First who lost locally did not have some excellent people on their team.

 
A more recent example from Royal Wootton Bassett in 2017.   

When Go Ahead first took over Thamesdown Transport it started a route R1 from Swindon to Bassett every 15 minutes in competition with the established Stagecoach route 55.   Unsurprisingly Stagecoach responded by increasing its service to every 10 minutes.  Having 10 buses an hour between the towns was not going to be sustainable and after three months Thamesdown withdrew.   It wasn't long before Stagecoach reverted to its previous service of a bus every 20 minutes.

 
The late 1980s and early 1990s were the Wild West of bus deregulation.

I remember the town routes in Taunton having THREE competing operators. There was the legacy NBC operator, Southern National, privatised and management bought in 1988. Along came local coach operator Berrys, with a fleet of second hand Bristol VRs, to compete directly on town and feeder routes. Of course they had no interest in competing on the longer distance rural services. Southern National responded by acquiring a fleet of minibuses, with cheaper drivers, to force out Berrys. At one point my Grandparents on a Taunton housing estate were served by SIX buses an hour. Two per hour each for Southern National using Carlyle or Iveco bodied Ford Transits, with Berrys Beaverbus using double deckers. At this time there was also Taunton Bus with a mix of old single deckers and hoppa types. Fares went down to as low as 10p for a trip into town, which is around 30p today. Bonkers. The current single fare into town is £2.60!

Southern National could absorb the losses. The upstarts couldn't. It wasn't long before town and feeder services reverted to a single operator.

Today, the same housing area my Grandparents lived in, is served by Firstbus (Southern National successor) only. One single decker bus an hour.

 

40 years ago today.   For the most part, the early days of commercially run buses rushing to pick up passengers on core trunk routes while the vital but much thinner branched languishes and lost service are over.  The legal requirement to not work with other operators because that might form an anti-competitive cartel has been broadly overcome by Enhanced Partnerships.  So many socially necessary services have been lost due to lack of either commercial balance or local authority money to buy them back. Tricky subsidising decisions that must show clear water (or a crevasse) between commercial and supported services such that a supported service must not abstract substantive traffic from a commercial one lead to both services being the poorer and less passenger appropriate.

 
From WikiPedia