LDN Olympics- the story -buses- part 1

The 30th Olympic games took place in London recently.There was plenty of action of the bus front:

A. Vehicles

Buses were used on three different sort of services:
1. Transfers
this means transporting officials, workers, media people, sport people/participants between different venues
and their hotels.
2. Park and Ride services aimed at spectators- and were only available if you pre-booked them when you paid for your tickets.
3. Extra buses provided on normal services.
[1] and [2] were not really 'public services', while [3] were ordinary public services- available to anyone.

[1] Transfers
the contract was won by Stagecoach;
500 buses were needed for this task. most were stagecoach buses [mainly E400 Trident or Scanias, and E300 bodied Man or ADL].
But they were assisted by buses from all over the UK- even from Northern Ireland.
Some firms sent coaches rather than buses.
Unfortunately, due to security reasons, fleet names, fleet numbers and any sign identify those vehicle with the olympics had to be removed,
so this made photographing those vehicles fairly uninteresting.

[2] Park and Ride
those services were only available if you pre booked a ticket for the events. mainly they were park and ride service between the venues and rail/train stations.
First won the contract:
100 brand new Wright bodied volvo B9TL [36181-36280], as well as 100 E400ADL [33656-755] and 50 former Londont tridents [plaxton or alx400 bodies] as well as 45 existing Wright bodied volvo B7/9TLs were employed on those services.

[3] service enhancements
Those were service enhancement to the normal TfL owned bus network.
about 200 extra buses were deployed; this sounds impressive, but...
the games took place during school holidays, so the total Peak Vehicle Requirement for day to day service drops by 131 buses.

B: Adverts and liveries


In the following msgs, I will try to show some of it...

regards

Yoram