Hello. Welcome aboard!
Hello, my name is Jake Bamford and I'm currently the proud owner of two double decker buses. I hail from here in Kent although I have spent time living on the Isle of Wight and in Southeast London As an enthusiast I'm fortunate to work in the bus industry and have done for over ten years now. I've had various jobs in that time from bus driver to operations manager. My service bus days were started in London at Peckham garage- the new one as opposed to the old one that was in the middle of Peckham. Since then I've worked for big multi national bus groups to small operators with a few second hand buses on local council routes.
Your interested in buses????
I expect it's something anyone interested in buses gets used too. Most people will be into football, or some kind of tedious sport, some will be into cars or bikes, some maybe into aircraft or even trains. So when they ask you what your interest is, the reply is bound to be "Your interested in buses?" normally followed by "why?".
I blame my Dad. Well he does seem to be the cause of all this! Although he's not a real bus enthusiast himself (he's more into things with wings) he often used to take me down to the big international hoverport at the end of our road in Ramsgate and show me the open top buses down there - as well as the hovercraft, obviously. One day he bought me a yellow Corgi open top Routemaster bus from the gift shop and I was hooked. When your four years old buses are massive. It was like watching a house drive down the road! It was this time when I thought "I'm going to drive one of those one day!"
So why make a website then?
Well one day, when I was an operations manager of a local bus company, I had a few hours to kill and whilst surfing the net in my palatial (cough cough) office I discovered Fotopic. This was a haven for anoraks such as myself, who could browse through hundreds of bus pictures. "Maybe'" I thought, "maybe I should do a site about my bus 7681?" So I signed up and started Jakes Bus Pictures which has proved to be quite successful, especially as a communications tool. However as Fotopic is about pictures it was hard to explain the whys and the wherefores of bus preservation and vehicle ownership. I discovered Weebly when I created a site for Friends of the East Kent (FotEK) and have decided to use them for this site. I would recommend either of these sites for anyone who wants to have a go at creating their very own little space on the web.