Now it's no secret that I work within the bus industry.  On the whole it's great fun (working on the engineer side anyway!) and gives me a chance to play with someone else's buses for a change.  Sometimes it can be a pain.  Over the winter my garage was short staffed in my department -  only by one person -  but as there's normally only four of us, one person makes a huge difference. Instead of working five out of seven days we were all working six out of seven, which was fabulous for the overtime but when it came to having a social life I was either sleeping,  working, thinking about sleeping or thinking about going to work. Needless to say that not much got done with any of my vehicles between November and February because of this.  It was a struggle getting the taxis done and that was only easy because they were outside my door!
Moaning aside,  there are obviously perks to working in the industry.  As I said earlier,  it's sometimes nice to play with other (less demanding?) buses every so often. My garage is home to a preserved bus,  AEC Regent MFN946F.  Although preserved she still has to earn her keep occasionally and she's all class 6 and has a tachograph for private hires (staff weddings are a favourite!)  which contributes to her cost. She is pretty immaculate and to be honest is probably the closest thing to riding a new AEC Regent I'll ever get. Now one minor bug bare has been her lack of appropriate destination blinds.  She had no number blinds and was running with modern 'Dayglo' blinds from another garage. Believe it or not,  bus companies have budgets and at the moment ours is very tight.  Obviously reproduction blinds aren't  cheap and we couldn't justify the cost (for now). So with a number of shows looming what could I do? Well I decided to adapt and create.  It will have appropriate blinds in it for the big year -  even if they are fixed with a limited number of places to display. In fact I've spent more time working on this than I have my own vehicles! 
Her first show is at The South East Bus Festival at Detling on 2nd April so I hope you get to enjoy her and maybe have a ride on her.

Although things may have appeared quiet nothing could be further from the truth.  I've been working on the taxi and bus collection pretty solidly over the last few months. I now have one Metrocab taxi on the road,  one ready for the MOT and N301XRP coming along nicely with the repair to the floor panel. In addition to all of that,  I've been trying to sort out a decent set of destination blinds for Stagecoach AEC Regent MFN946F.  Our first show this year will be the South East Bus Festival and Heritage Car Show at Detling on 2nd April. Then on the 16th April I will be at the Colne Valley Railway. More dates and vehicle news will be announced soon.  And don't forget the Thanet Vintage Bus Road Run is going to be held on Sunday 1st May this year.