The city of Nottingham
and county town of Nottinghamshire operate one of the largest former municipal
fleet of buses in the United Kingdom.
Still controlled by the council this large modern fleet has a vast
amount of interest to the transport enthusiast.
In 2004 trams returned to the streets of Nottingham and are currently operated
by Nottingham Express Transit.
These trams are in competition with the buses and are covered in greater
detail in our ‘Nottingham Trams’ DVD programme.
The modern day bus fleet is very colourful, as all routes are colour
coded and branded. This branding was
introduced in the early 2000s and given the names of ‘Network’ and ‘Go2’. The former have a green-based livery with
colour coding for specific routes, the ‘Go2’ brand are silver based with
route colour coding. Some buses are in
an either generic green livery or silver livery, carrying a rainbow ‘swirl’ so
they can be used on any route if the correct vehicle is not available. At the time of filming the ‘Network’ brand
was slowly being phased out in favour of ‘Go2’. The fleet is currently made up of mostly
Scania high capacity double deckers.
These include Scania OmniDekkas with East Lancs bodywork
and Scania N230UD double deckers with Enviro400 bodies. Single deckers are represented by the Scania
OmniCity, OmniLink and OmniTown and ADL Enviro200 buses. There is a small number of Optare Solo and
Solo SRs, with some being electric versions introduced in 2014. Other bus operators in the city are Trent-Barton,
Yourbus based in Heanor and AOT Coaches that operate to the city
from Hucknall. Trent-Barton also
use striking colour coded liveries for their operations into the city on their
single decker fleet.
The independent
transport videos cameras visited Nottingham on three occasions, the
first in April 2015 and the second and third in August and September 2016. Many locations were chosen to give you the
best view of this smart modern fleet.
Some of these include Upper and Lower Parliament Street, which is
probably the best location to see all operators going about their daily
business. Market Street, Queen Street,
Carrington Street, Collin Street, Victoria Street and Fletcher Gate are also
featured. More action is filmed at Maid
Marion Way and Beastmarket Hill. We then
move away from the city centre to film the bus action on Southchurch Drive in
Clifton. Our cameras also visit Beeston
and Chilwell. 1966 saw the end of
trolleybus operation in the city. To
commemorate this event East Lancs
bodied Scania OmniDekka, 696 (YN05
WFE) has been painted in the livery of the Nottingham City Transport
trolleybuses, which we see in service on route 77 on Maid Marion Way operating
to Cinderhill - back in the day this would have been trolleybus route 41! We hope you enjoy your visit to Nottingham
with us!