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Harris Bus was born when buses were deregulated in 1986, following the Privatisation
of the National Bus company. It started off using coaches and Daimler Fleetline double
decker buses which came from the parent coach company fleet, along with Essex
County Council school contracts. The bus company started to grow very quickly,
winning pretty much every single Essex County Council contract that became available
- before long Harris Bus had established quite a nice sized local network; the company
even started running it’s own commercial routes in competition with London Country
and it’s successive companies.
The longest and most consistent ‘competition’ was on route 383 between Lakeside
shopping centre and Chadwell St Mary, via Grays. Over the years, both companies
settled down into a pattern of half hourly services which were timed such that the passengers got a regular 15 minute service - they even ran opposite directions in a
loop around the Lakeside area, providing a local ‘town service’ between them......
how many bus passengers around the UK can claim that kind of service from
competing bus companies?!!
In 1990, following the opening of the Lakeside Shopping Centre, Harris Bus introduced
4 special routes from various towns in North Kent and Essex which all brought potential
shoppers for a day at Lakeside. Such was the success of the Kent services that duplicate
buses were often called for, so more services in Kent were provided and the Essex
routes were dropped. Harris Bus had also secured the contract for the Coach park
‘park n ride’ service, and had, by this time become the contracted rail replacement
operator for LTS/c2c.
Harris bus saw a new era of expansion in 1996 when they started to gain work in London
for TfL, first with School route 661 in the Eltham area, then the 108 - quite a biggie at
the time as it was the only route to pass through the Blackwall tunnel on it’s routing
from Stratford to Lewisham, and it pre-dated the opening of the Jubilee line.
Harris Bus opened a small base in Crayford which provided some of the allocation for
the 108, as well as the vehicle for the 661. Harris Bus made further gains from TfL in
the form of Ilford area routes 128,129 & 150 - then followed them up with the 132
(Bexleyheath) and the 180 (Lewisham). The depot at West Thurrock was getting quite
crowded with the Ilford area buses - given that there were now three routes South
of the Thames, and the 108 went South too, the decision was made to open a fully
fledged second depot in Belvedere, with the Crayford based vehicles moving there.
By 2000, Harris Bus had gone into administration - it appears the company got it’s sums
wrong when it bid for the TfL work, and as a consequence, TfL set up it’s own bus
company and took the routes over themselves, along with the Belvedere depot.
The full Harris Bus fleet history can now be found within the ‘Miscellaneous Bus Stuff’
area of this website - click here to go there now.
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