Midland Red Information

In the spring of 1999, Midland Red West Limited had recently acquired a fleet of 64 new MercedesBenz 0.814 Vario minibuses at Worcester and, being part of the newly formed FirstBus, renamed to First Midland Red Buses Limited. One morning in that spring I found myself in Droitwich with fellow minibus driver, Dennis Humphries, sat in one of those minibuses talking about the internet. Dennis had just bought himself a new digital camera and was interested in finding out how to post photographs on the net, while I had experimented a little with writing web pages and wished to expand my knowledge but I didn't really have any interesting subject matter. Dennis also noted that he had recently searched the net for information about our new minibuses but had found nothing. So it was decided, Dennis would take some photographs of the new minibuses and I would write a simple website to display them. At the time, neither of us had any interest in, or knowledge of the bus enthusiasts movement, but we figured there must be someone out there who'd be interested. We'd both seen enthusiasts in bus stations and as these people were called bus spotters by the drivers, the name BusSpotter.com1 was duly purchased and registered. A simple website was written with red and dark blue colours to match the FirstBus style, and the content featured about 20 photographs, a simple fleet list, a guestbook page and a discussion forum. Initially take up was slow, but by mid-2000 we had a regular number of repeat visitors.