The real time signs at the stops are fed by the telematics on the buses, so a sign only shows a bus that is actually on its way. The sign outside the depot shows a bus every night at ten past twelve. Route, destination, due in one minute. There is no such bus on the road. The sign counts down to due, and holds, and clears, the way it does when a bus has arrived and gone, and nothing has.
I am the control room operator at a bus depot and the real time signs are my screen turned outwards.
The signs.
At every stop, an orange display that shows what is coming and when, fed by the box on each bus, which tells the system where it is. If a bus is not on the road it is not on the sign. It is that simple, and it is the thing the public trusts, and it is right almost all the time.
The stop outside our own gate has a sign. At ten past twelve, every night, it shows a bus.
The bus.
Route thirty. Destination, the crematorium, which is the end of the thirty and always has been. Due in three minutes. Then two. Then one. Then due. It holds at due for the time a bus takes to stop and load and go, and then it clears.
No thirty is on the road at ten past twelve. The last one is at eleven. The system has no vehicle logged on the route. The sign shows it anyway, and the sign is not mine to argue with, because the sign shows what the system tells it, and the system, at ten past twelve, is being told.
What has been checked.
The sign, replaced. The feed, traced by the supplier, who found the message that puts the bus on the sign and traced it to a vehicle id that is not in our fleet and stopped there because the id was, they said, malformed, in a way that meant it was very old.
The stop, at ten past twelve, by me, standing at it. The sign said due in one minute. I looked up the road. Nothing. The sign said due. I stood at the stop as anybody stands when a bus is due, at the kerb, looking, and the air moved past me the way it does when a bus pulls in, the push of it, and the smell of the brakes, and the sign held at due, and something opened beside me at the height of a door, I heard it, the hiss, and stayed open the time a door stays open, and closed, and the push of air went away up the road, and the sign cleared.
I did not get on. I want that written down.
Who.
The thirty goes to the crematorium. It always has. It is the bus the town takes to funerals, and it was, in the days when the crematorium had a late service, the bus the town took to the late ones, and the last thirty on those nights was at ten past twelve from our stop, because our stop was the last on the way out, and the drivers on the late thirty were the ones who did not mind.
The old hands said one of them had done it for years and had, one night, taken the last thirty to the crematorium and not come back with it, and the bus had been found at the crematorium gates in the morning with the engine running and the doors open and the driver in his seat, and the id on the box, the supplier said, was from a batch that old.
He is running his bus. Every night, ten past twelve, from our stop to the crematorium, on the sign, on time, and for a year nobody got on.
The night it came.
I was at the stop again. The sign said due. And it came. Up the road, with its lights, a thirty, a single decker, the old livery, the blind saying CREMATORIUM, and it pulled in, and the doors opened, and the driver looked at me, an ordinary man in a uniform from before mine, and waited.
I said, not tonight, thanks.
He nodded. The way a driver nods when somebody at a stop is waiting for a different bus. And the doors closed, and it went, and the sign cleared.
What is done about it.
The sign shows the thirty at ten past twelve and the public, if there is any at that hour, sees a bus due that does not come, and there have been no complaints, because the people at that stop at that hour are, mostly, ones who have just come off a late shift at the depot, and they know.
What I do.
I run the control room.
I put a note on the stop. In the frame where the timetable goes, under the thirty, a line, in the style of the others, that says: 00:10 to the crematorium, request stop, runs as required. It is not a lie. It runs. It is required by somebody. And the people who see the sign say due and see nothing come now read the note, and some of them, I have seen it on the stop camera, put their hand up to request it, and put it down again, and I do not know what they are deciding, and I do not think it is mine to know.