A journey to Eclipse all others

We join Craig George and his fellow team members on an epic journey to Ukraine, fuelled by cross-industry generosity

It must have been around five or six years ago that I found myself driving an ex Plymouth Citybus Super Pointer Dart through the Glynn Valley between Bodmin and Liskeard. It was early: I’d got a head start on the day to get the bus to Plymouth for MOT prep, so the sun was just rising as I turned from the A30 onto the A38 at Bodmin. Perhaps it was the early hour, or more likely still my alarming tendency to daydream when I really should be concentrating, but all of a sudden I felt this strange sense of elation. It was just my bus and I; empty roads and fleeting glimpses through gaps in evergreen trees revealed the valley below bathed in sun-kissed mist. In that very moment it was so easy to imagine that I was somewhere I’d much rather be – anywhere but home; Switzerland, southern Poland or any other spectacular mountain range you care to nominate.

Looking back, it sounds ridiculously fantastical. After all, who in their right mind would take a 17-year-old British urban bus and expect it to climb over a European mountain range after a marathon journey across Europe itself? Worse still, what if that occurred almost by accident?

As it happens, that’s exactly what myself and three other bus industry personalities have just done. However, we didn’t take a pair of Volvo B7RLEs over the Carpathians without good cause. Nor did we end up there accidentally; but mountain roads and steep elevations were certainly one of many things I managed to overlook when planning a very ambitious journey in the name of supporting Ukraine.

How it started

Avid readers, skimmers and casual page-turners of this publication may well recall my previous tales focussed on Ukraine, including driving a LAZ through the Chernobyl exclusion zone and also documenting the epic journey to Eastern Poland with three VDL SB200 Wright Commanders donated by Arriva in the early days of the current conflict in which Ukraine finds itself embroiled. Hence my enthusiasm when it comes to doing more to help this glorious and proud nation.

My journey to Chernobyl in 2019, unbeknownst to me at the time, was the planting of a seed that has put me in touch with a fascinating network of people; some of whom now concentrate all their free time on their Ukraine UK Aid organisation. This includes Elliott Svatos who, like myself, is a former client and now friend of legendary Chernobyl tour guide Nikolai Fomin. Between them and others involved in Ukraine UK Aid they are now doing an excellent job of targeting aid, including cars, to exactly where they are needed in Ukraine. Crucially, they do this without losing sight of their aid and vehicles. This is becoming more important as some unscrupulous people are skimming aid and selling it for profit, including exports to Africa.

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It was from watching these incredible efforts that I became inspired to have another go at making a personal contribution to the cause; but alas, what could this Cornish country bus bumpkin bring to the table? Knowing it was a long shot from the start, I asked Elliott and Nikolai if they knew of any organisation that could do some good with a bus. Not that I had one to give, but I had to start somewhere after all! Through their networks of aid organisations and with a few changes of plan along the way, after a few weeks it seemed two good trustworthy causes had been found. Just like that, I knew I had to do my best to help.

As with the Ukraine Aid scene, the bus industry too has a strong network of people and characters and as such it wasn’t long before I was put in touch with Andy Metcalfe, Fleet Manager at First UK Bus. Having laid out my case and clinging on to my strong belief in the old adage ‘if you don’t ask, you don’t get,’ I was delighted to hear back from Andy who was sure that First could help my mission with the donation of two heavyweight single deck buses retiring from its fleet. Not only that, but Andy had a vision of a special livery in support of Ukraine too and proposed that the vehicles were repainted and prepared for their journey.

Generosity

The remarkably generous donation of these two assets gave me the solid foundations I needed to make my dream a reality: I had two vehicles, two homes for them and it was time to start planning the logistics of bridging the 2,000 mile gap across Europe.

Thankfully First’s timescale for getting the buses out of service and prepared gave me plenty of planning time and with a simple plea on social media, including Facebook and LinkedIn, I was soon approached by Craig Temple, Managing Director of Connexions Buses in Harrogate. Craig and I had been on each others radar for some time although we had never met, again united by journeys to Chernobyl as well as our glorious profession.

Being Cornish and of rural character, I don’t really do buzzwords, but for the sake of fitting the vernacular of this cosmopolitan publication I must say that with just one conversation with Craig T the project really levelled up! In no time at all he introduced a third character to the team: John Atkin who is a transport manager with exceptional knowledge of operating in Europe.

Huge credit must go to Craig T and John for making the project their own, leaving this bewildered Cornishman in their wake! John very soon had a route planned and Craig T had organised overnight parking in Germany thanks to his contacts in Europe, as well as a very generous donation of Volvo B7RLE parts from Partline, including pumps, filters and a whole myriad of other commonly replaced parts. In the meantime I secured our fourth driver: a colleague of mine at OTS Falmouth; Tamsin Fowles. Like myself, Tamsin has been a local bus driver since she was just 18, spending most of her career with Western National and under its subsequent guises before leaving the industry for a while, before re-joining with us at OTS.

Now with all the logistics in place, there was just one more thing to sort: the small matter of paying for the journey. Thankfully, James Church, now former Senior Commercial Manager at Go South West came to me with a proposal. Go South West had been supporting Plymouth Ukraine Medical Aid (P.U.M.A) with semi-regular donation of a vehicle and drivers from their Dartline operation to transport medical aid to the Slovakia/Ukraine border near Uzhhorod. His proposal was that if we filled the vehicles with P.U.M.A aid, Go South West would fund all fuel and tolls for the journey. Of course we couldn’t resist this win-win scenario so I metaphorically ripped James’ hand off! Ali Piper from P.U.M.A agreed to fund the ferries and would join us on our epic journey so she could deliver her aid directly to those who would distribute it within Ukraine.

Two offers of funding to cover the mounting incidental costs such as accommodation and repatriation flights for the crew came from Ukraine UK Aid and also John Harris at Global Talent who previously brought about the aforementioned Arriva donation.

With that, the pieces of the jigsaw came together. We soon found a small window of common free dates and before I knew it, I found myself stood on the platform at Truro station making an awkward Facebook live video to document the start of my journey to Sheffield, where two Volvo B7RLEs were awaiting their new temporary keeper.

From there, I shall let my diary take up the story.

Monday 14 August

It was late by the time I arrived in Sheffield and lugged myself and my assorted stuff through the city, past the transport interchange and up to my digs for the night; a former Primark store now converted to an EasyHotel. Not only did I have to be budget-conscious to preserve the funds of our financial supporters but I must also confess to having a long history of punishing myself, and occasionally my long-suffering family, by staying in terrible hotels.

Thus, the very cheap windowless room option had been selected, the only disappointment being that I wasn’t able to inflict it upon my loved ones. I was simultaneously pleased and disappointed to find the hotel was actually very well finished and having an air-conditioned windowless room was rather good at preventing daylight and the heat of the day waking me up, ensuring a much needed deep and long sleep was enjoyed.

Tuesday 15 August

I spent the morning at leisure in Sheffield exploring places named and mentioned in the works of my favourite singer-songwriter; former Pulp bassist Richard Hawley who famously hales from the city. Having crossed Lady’s Bridge and loitered at Coles Corner, I strolled down to First South Yorkshire’s very large Olive Grove depot, oddly enough yet to be enshrined in Hawley’s lyrics. There I met Lauren Wilks, Marketing Executive for First Midlands, Manchester & South Yorkshire. We spent some time going through the PR and filming my parts of a promotional video Lauren was putting together to raise awareness of our journey and First’s crucial role in that ahead of collection the next day.

I celebrated by walking up to the Park Hill estate; the setting of Chris Bush and Richard Hawley’s musical ‘Standing at the Sky’s Edge,’ where huge inter-linked towers of controversially grade-II listed post-war flats stand; many of which have been gentrified and modernised in recent years, leaving behind their dark and murky reputation of being modern slums and home to much illegal and antisocial activity. From there I returned to the city to see off a great big pie for dinner and back to my EasyHotel cave for one last rest before the madness began.

Wednesday 16 August

It had been arranged for Zoe Hands, the newly-installed First Midlands, Manchester & South Yorkshire Managing Director to officially hand the buses over to me early in the morning, so I left the orange and white walls behind me, bursting through the doors like I was about to belt out the opening number to a musical all of my own such was my anticipation and joy of the days that lie ahead. However, the already bustling city would surely not have appreciated it, so I quietly but eagerly employed shanks’ pony, arriving at Olive Grove 15 minutes later.

What a sight for sore eyes; YK05 FJE and MX56 AFN – formerly 66784 and 69237 respectively in First language – stood proudly in front of the building, resplendent in their new coat of ice white paint. I was promptly met by Ady Culpin, PR Manager for First UK Bus who introduced me to Zoe Hands and I was delighted to tell her all about the purpose of our journey before the obligatory PR photoshoot.

I was also met by a former colleague and superstar from my early career, Jason Smith-Potter who very kindly volunteered to drive one of the buses south to Plymouth. He brought his lad Jake with him because he too obviously likes torturing his family with uncomfortable journeys!

Among cheers, waves and well wishes, we pulled out of Olive Grove and set our sights just six miles south as we skirted the Sheffield CAZ and headed to the depot of Wellglade Group operator, TM Travel. We were met there by the friendly face of Group Engineering Director John Bickerton; another epic journey veteran and lynchpin of the 2022 Arriva journey.

John had kindly arranged for both buses to have a safety inspection and the donation of two full tanks of fuel and essential sundry parts. We were ably looked after by John and his engineering team: a minor leak was spotted and quickly cured, jubilee clips, pipes and cable ties collected and leaks of other sorts strategically taken by the driving crew before pointing the venerable B7RLE pair south west.

The traffic gods were kind and with a single stop taken at Bridgwater services (yes, I know: we misjudged) for fuel of the coffee variety we were soon arriving at the Go South West Plymouth Citybus depot – just in the nick of time to get Jason on the last train back to Sheffield!

However, the usual queue of traffic into Plymouth revealed quite why so many people had been waving and flashing at me; the brake lights and main beam lamps on FJE were intermittently illuminating every two seconds and continued to do so even with the master switch off. Perplexed, and wondering if I had inadvertently triggered a walk-round check assistance system I sought the assistance of a Citybus engineer with the intention of performing the usual Volvo trick of disconnecting the batteries. Thankfully by the time I returned with spanner in hand, Jason had already cured the fault by using the battery protection reset.

With that, we parted ways at Plymouth and I headed back to Falmouth for a short night at home with the family before the eastward journey began.

Determined to get as much sleep as I could cram in to that short time, imagine my disbelief when the wife popped her head in while I was mid-shower at 2200 to tell me my colleague and second driver for the journey, Tamsin, had just rung to say, in a frenzied manner, that she was having trouble finding her passport!

Sleep is never impossible for me, and I soon found myself in the land of nod, not knowing if I had a second driver beyond Dover.

Thursday 17 August

I woke at 0345, ready for my 0430 departure to Plymouth, incredibly relieved to find a text message from Tamsin to advise she had found her passport. I was soon collecting her from home and we were Plymouth bound.

We collected FJE and AFN at 0630, and after diligent walk-round checks Tamsin and I took a bus each and headed to the P.U.M.A warehouse to collect our aid cargo.

We spent four hours with the incredibly hard working team from P.U.M.A loading endless boxes of assorted aid in the most responsible way we could; using seats as restraints and baffles and running ratchet straps across stanchions and grab rails to contain and secure the cargo whilst retaining access to the emergency door. There wasn’t a single available space left unfilled – the P.U.M.A volunteers could be very useful loading coaches for school residentials, I tell you! In fact, they may even be able to fit the luggage of 16 Americans in a Sprinter boot: that’s how good they are!

Once laden, and already feeling like we’d done three days’ work in four hours, we changed direction for the final time and pointed the buses east for what transpired to be an eventless, free-flowing journey all the way to Folkestone where we eventually landed at the depot of Crosskeys Coaches. The very kind and friendly team there had agreed to let us park overnight; secure parking being very desirable given our large and valuable cargo.

Having been joined by Ali from P.U.M.A in Plymouth, the three of us took a taxi in to Folkestone for our stay at the Britannia Grand Burstin Hotel.

Going back to what I was saying about my attraction to low-quality hotels, it was quite by accident that we ended up at the Grand Burstin, which as many of you will know, has a less than great reputation among coach drivers. I had planned to stay in the Premier Inn near the Crosskeys depot but it was fully booked, so I was able to move a step closer to my sadistic ambition of staying in every Britannia hotel in the UK.

No sooner had we checked in, our final jigsaw piece clicked in to place when Craig T and John arrived. We made use of the very cheap hotel bar before heading in to town for dinner and as suspected, within 10 minutes we all knew that we were going to all get along just fine!

Friday 18 August

We awoke from our slumber at the Grand Burstin to discover most of us had enjoyed a sea view, and rather lovely it was too. Whilst it’s no Ritz, the Grand Burstin was actually very much what you make it. The staff had been friendly, the drinks cheap and it was reasonably clean and tidy; probably one of the better Britannia hotels I’ve had the, err, pleasure of staying in.

We took a short time to admire the modern Crosskeys fleet in its striking shade of orange, including their most recent Tourismo still with its new coach smell, before heading to the port of Dover.

Having been through the relatively simple check-in process, armed with our Goods Movement Reference paperwork we were soon boarding our DFDS ferry.

There is a certain oddness that descends upon you when you find yourself driving a British service bus onto a ferry bound for foreign shores. It just doesn’t feel like it’s meant to be, and that’s a feeling that stays with you for as long as you’re on the wrong, or right, side of the road.

Thankfully the ferry lift feature was working on both vehicles, as we certainly needed it. Having safely stowed our steeds, we headed to the cargo driver canteen for a wonderful breakfast as we left the white cliffs behind.

Upon leaving the canteen, we spotted our vehicle registration marks highlighted on the screen, indicating that we needed to stop at French customs. A friendly trucker overheard us talking and advised us to follow the orange line out of the port. He was absolutely right, the orange line led us in to a huge truck park and warehouse. We kept following the line, waiting to find somewhere apparent or an official indicating for us to pull in to a search area. With confusion rife, and no real idea of what we were expected to do, we kept following the road through truck parks, around buildings and through open gates until we got to an archetypal border control building; an arrangement of kiosks under a large canopy with segregated lanes. Suspiciously, we had left all other vehicles behind, not a single kiosk was manned and there was only one way out: the French tarmac of the motorway ahead. Somehow we had managed to simultaneously do the wrong thing by inadvertently driving straight through the pièce de résistance of all things customs by doing the right and honourable thing of going there in the first place.

With only one thing to do, we decided to trepidatiously continue, sure that soon our mirrors would be filled with Peugeot and Citroen police cars, baguettes and onions flying everywhere from their open windows and their Gendarme pilots faces filled with rage and out for English blood. Yet, it wasn’t to be. As the miles, sorry, kilometres, passed under our wheels and we crossed in to Belgium, the anxieties faded. I must apologise to our French friends, should any be reading this article and made it this far before an afternoon snooze; we really did try to do the right thing!

Having lost an hour simply by crossing into mainland Europe and conscious that our next overnight stop was in Aschaffenburg, south east of Frankfurt we continued our way on the E40, faultlessly munching the tarmac at a steady 50mph, as limited. The only thing that didn’t seem to be limited was the temperature; 32 degrees Celcius during the day.

When parking your cars or coaches, many of you will have used an app called RingGo. Well, in Brussels they have the RingStop – yes, as always the R0 Brussels ring road was its usual stop-start self but other than that we cruised on nicely, crossing uneventfully in to Germany and eventually arriving in Aschaffenburg at 2130. We parked our buses at the security-patrolled town bus station, courtesy of Craig T and his contact Marc Bichtemann in Germany and set off to find our hotel on the other side of the rail lines; the rail and bus stations neatly positioned together in wonderful Germanic fashion.

Keen to find food we ventured in to town, John’s desperation to sample currywurst was inspirational and we set off in search of finding somewhere still serving. Alas, it was not to be; the only thing still being served it seemed was the local beer. So, we settled for a kebab served by a man who told us he spoke no English, then went on to demonstrate his complete English vocabulary “Speak no English, speak no English! How are you today? Not good!” he joked. We didn’t care how much or how little English he spoke; he fed us nicely and after a sample of the local hospitality we eventually collapsed into the hotel just after midnight, ready for an 0700 alarm the next day.

Saturday 19 August

Having left the hotel and checked both buses were still intact and laden, we went to a nearby supermarket to have a rummage and collect Germanic snacks for the journey. With that small mission accomplished we set off again for what was planned to be our longest drive of the mission, and by jove wasn’t it! 539 miles at 50mph, eventually set to arrive at Nové Zámky in Slovakia.

All was going well, save for the buses starting to get a little warm on inclines in the heat of the day. We had pottered continuously across the vastness of Germany until lunchtime, where we finally found and made good use of a fast-food style, order-from-a-machine currywurst purveyor.

Another 120 miles down the road however, our first disaster struck. FJE developed an air leak, thankfully just a few hundred yards before a service station. Craig and John barely managed to nurse it in to the services and stop in the coach park just as the brakes brought FJE to a stop.

In no time at all, John was all over it, as we say. Which is highly deceptive in this case as he was very much under it; just a pair of trainers to be seen as he diagnosed the fault; the heat from a slight blow in a section of exhaust had caused an air line to rupture.

Craig T and I set off to enquire with the many parked truck drivers if they had a connector we could half-inch. Thankfully the second trucker we found, a great Polish guy in a Scania had exactly what we needed. My Polish vocabulary is limited, despite my pure love of that fine nation, but I gave him all the relevant Polish words I had in thanks before returning with a couple of bottles of beer and a small bottle of wine for his wife who was riding shotgun.

Challenging

Meanwhile, John and Craig T had the air pipe fixed, re-routed slightly and were now in discussion around how to create a heat-shield over the hole in the exhaust to prevent a repeat performance. No sooner said than done, John had sampled a new flavour of Coca-Cola and the can was being cut open and then jubilee-clamped over the hole; a repair which proved to be a durable one! Not only did the bus sound much less throaty, but it lasted for the remainder of the journey.

A journey that was thankfully much less eventful. Hundreds of miles of Austrian, then Hungarian countryside rolled past. There were some long climbs on the motorway where both buses got very hot indeed, although thankfully AFN, which was most prone to overheating, would slip in to limp mode at 100ºC and then wouldn’t get any hotter. We persevered and it was dark as we entered Hungary and we still had a fair way to go.

Lynne Beale at Arriva UK, another veteran of the first such trip I was involved with, had very kindly arranged overnight parking for us at the Arriva depot in Nové Zamky. However, it was not to be.

We crossed the magnificent steel bridge over the Danube, and in doing so crossed from Hungary in to Slovakia at Komárno. When we then arrived in Nové Zámky it was late, around 2330. We decided that we should drop the majority of crew at the Grand Hotel just in case we were locked out after a certain time. Having done that and dropped our bags, the other lads and myself returned to the buses, ready to nip them in to the Arriva depot and hopefully have a little nose around and some funky Slovakian kit.

However, FJE, seemingly bitter about its unexpected introduction to the very Eastern European world of make-do-and-mend engineering had decided enough was enough. With no ignition, it was going nowhere. Again, John and Craig T to the rescue and with me being no use whatsoever, I was banished to the hotel so at least two drivers were fresh(ish) for another early start.

However, I returned to the buses around 45 minutes later to collect something I’d left behind, only to hear the dulcet tones of the seven litre engine bursting in to life: the dream team had struck again and after much trial and error, found the offending fuse. With saloon heating being something we definitely didn’t need, that system had sacrificed a fuse for the greater good.

The buses were parked at the front of the hotel for the night rather than with their Slovakian sisters, ready for an 0800 start the next day.

In part two, Craig continues his journey and crosses the border into Ukraine

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