A Reaction to Omnibuses April Fool's

Today, the author of the Omnibuses blog posted an interesting April Fool's joke which claimed to show the details of the new *potential* local First brands in the south, including new fleetnames, liveries and more. Click here if you haven't read it. Now, unfortunately, I did fall for it initially, but this gave me an interesting insight to how I would feel about any forthcoming changes to my local fleet.

Here's the last local livery to appear on First buses around Fareham, Gosport and Portsmouth - the red and cream of Firstbus Provincial. This is my "artist's impression" of what it would look like on a Solo - and - although I'm biased I think it looks quite good. I did always prefer the green but grew up with this livery - this is my local livery.

Now, the Omnibuses blog post reported that Fareham buses would be called Hampshire Coastline and have a green and black livery. What would I want the company to be called if it went local? Well, firstly, with the growth of "First South Coast" I doubt whether individual fleetnames would come back, but it would be nice to have something like "First serving Southern Hampshire" or "First serving Portsmouth" - like Stagecoach - just to make them a little more localised.

Secondly, if there was a new livery, I found myself expecting the liveries to return to their traditional colours - i.e. green for Hoeford, red for Southampton, blue or maroon for Portsmouth. This would probably be completely wrong - now under Go Ahead a traditional livery may return like Southern Vectis' green, but under First would there be a new livery? And furthermore, would there be a First style just with local colouring variations? If First ever do return to local liveries it would be very interesting to see what happens.

What would you want?

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On another note, it has been confirmed Snappy Designs UK has gone into Liquidation, and therefore fotopic is no more unless it is bought out very soon. A sad and increasingly likely end to the one website which has increased bus photos on the web more than any other.