On Friday afternoon it was noticed that a lintel in the bus station appeared to be crumbling and the ‘elf ‘n safety people feared that it may collapse and take every living soul, and every bus, within the bus station with it! So we are shut down until the structural engineers pronounce the bus station either safe or not fit for habitation. All buses are currently departing from the Broadway which is the road at the front of the bus station. Normally the only local buses to use this area for pick ups and and drop offs are the number 5 local bus and the Park and Ride services. It’s main purpose is for tour coaches to drop off and pick up their passengers as well as being used by scheduled National Express coaches. Of course chaos ensued yesterday as local buses tried to share this limited space with coaches from all over Europe dropping off tourists for the Cathedral and Winchester tours. There’s an added problem with foreign coaches, all the doors are on offside of the bus when it’s driving on the left side of the road. As the passengers disembark they do so into the road effectively making the coach about 50% wider than it really is.

This is a picture of the cordoned off bus station. Just before I took this picture there were two buses parked there, one acting as the bus station office and the other as a driver’s rest room. The driver’s rest bus had to be rushed into service because another of our buses smashed its windscreen on a tree in the Broadway. Apart from the congestion in the Broadway it’s also lined with trees which are growing very close to the edge of the pavement with some leaning slightly over the road. Normally you just need to be careful not to bang the mirror but someone misjudged it a little worse than that yesterday. You also have to be very careful with a double decker because of the lean on the trees toward the road and the camber of the road leaning the bus toward the trees.