Tuesday January 13th 2026

I was thinking about the XL blog the other day and decided I should really update it after all !!

The current buses have done really well, but as with all fleets, wear and tear is taking its toll a bit. 

The best way of illustrating this is probably to look at the number of days for each vehicle when they were not on the road in 2025, in other words not in traffic. This doesn't necessarily mean they were unavailable, as on Sundays for example, only seven out of the nineteen are used. Here are the 2025 stats.

Naturally when a vehicle has been involved in an accident, this means a considerable time out of traffic. 36902 last worked on 31st May 2025 at which point it had only had 16 days off the road. 36909/13/19 all had extended periods out of traffic awaiting parts/repairs. 

The revamped timetable from 1st September has seen the 'D' shorts from Norwich to Dereham scrapped and all Excel services now call at Dereham. The weekday vehicle requirement has dropped from 16 to 15, meaning four vehicles can be off the road at any one time without affecting the service. The flip side of this, is that if a substitute B9 Gemini has to be used it now runs through to Peterborough or King's Lynn rather than hitherto when it would have been turned out on the D services to Dereham only. 

An anomaly of the restructured diagrams is that four Excel buses end up at Norwich on a Friday evening, but five are required for Saturday morning. This usually means that a B9 has to work one of the Saturday turns, sometimes just from Norwich to Lynn, but just as often it covers a whole days work with two trips to Peterborough. 

There, I can probably forget about this blog now for another few years ! Thanks to everyone who has mourned the blogs loss - far more than I could have ever imagined. I will try and update it again when time permits.

Wednesday 19th April 2023 - Burying the Blog

 It will have been quite obvious to all of you that the last 3 years have been a particularly fraught time for me with no updates year on year. 

This was not what I had intended but work pressures sometimes come to the fore and hobbies have to take a backseat. 

Fortunately, in the grand scheme of things, not much has happened since the introduction of the new 'red buses' and the relaxation of Covid restrictions.  

There have been rare occasions where substitute buses based in Norwich have made emergency appearances on the XL services, indeed this happened as recently as last week, but overall such substitutions are very rare.

So the time has come to retire from the blog, in much the same way that I retired from my working life last month. I can't complain about the help I have received from First Group over the years as they have been most appeciative of my efforts at reporting the service and I've made a lot of good friends. Too many to mention all in fact, but I must say Chris Speed has been influential and Zak Nelson has always been an inspiration to me with his enthusiasm for all things First.

Time for someone else to take up the baton maybe ? Well we will see, but in the meantime, you can still follow the fortunes of the Xl service by joining the First Eastern Counties group on Facebook. 

https://www.facebook.com/groups/20829445950351