Scarborough is a seaside resort in North Yorkshire. The main bus operator is East Yorkshire; buses allocated to Scarborough carrying Scarborough & District branding. East Yorkshire had taken over United’s Scarborough operations at deregulation, as United was considered too large to privatise as one company. Now most of United is united again under Arriva North East.

Interurban bus routes into the town include East Yorkshire’s long route 121 from Hull via Bridlington, the Yorkshire Coastliner service from Leeds & York and Arriva works in from Middlesbrough and Whitby.

Open top seafront services are operated by East Yorkshire and Shoreline Suncruisers, using a variety of vehicles. At the time of our visit, both operators were replacing their vehicles. Shoreline Suncruisers were moving from Daimler Fleetlines to ex- London MCW Metrobuses, while East Yorkshire was replacing Bristol VRs with Volvo Citybuses from its Finglands subsidiary in Manchester. One of Shoreline’s Fleetlines was ex- Chesterfield Transport; I remember the 123 Group buying all the upper deck parts for spares.

Additional transport interest is provided by the large number of visiting coaches that bring thousands of tourists to this popular resort.

Scarborough is also the home of Plaxton Coach & Bus, the only remaining UK coach bodybuilders. I’m pleased that the company survived closure when TransBus went into administration; it had a buy-out at this time but was later acquired by Alexander Dennis (the other half of TransBus) and remains in operation.

The Plaxton factory photos were taken during an organised visit on 26 August 2006; we travelled to Scarborough in M Pearson’s Leyland Leopard / Plaxton Supreme, now scrapped. At the time of our visit the factory was full of Stagecoach Express coaches in various stages of construction. As we moved along the production lines, we could see the complete progression from chassis frames to the finished vehicles. These were Volvo B7R / Plaxton Profiles for Stagecoach Scotland. We noticed that the completed and in-build vehicles were all registered with 06- plates, despite it being a few days before the new 56- registrations. This is because the chassis had been pre-registered in advance of the upcoming Euro 4 emissions requirements coming in October.

We then went into the Bus shop, which contained Centros in build for Arriva and a couple of Primos.

More completed vehicles were available for inspection in the yard outside, including a partially completed Centro for Centrebus.

The Plaxton Primo remains uncommon and many were disposed of prematurely. New ones have continued to appear, but this is because Plaxton still has the frames supplied by Enterprise Bus. There are unlikely to be any more. The Centro’s days may be numbered as well; the body wasn’t adapted for the VDL SB180 (the replacement for the SB120 that most Centros were built on), while MAN has ordered ADL Enviro 200 & 300s (Stagecoach style) for its new stock buses.

Both the Plaxton Centro and ADL Enviro were developed from a new bus design TransBus was working on at the time of its collapse; they look similar and now ADL owns Plaxton there probably isn’t a need for both.

The final Plaxton Pointers were built at Falkirk, including a large number for Stagecoach, the last of which were registered on 56- plates.

Dan Sellers