Celebrating 20 years of route branding

On Saturday 26 October, we’ll be celebrating 20 years since we first introduced our colour-coordinated  brands to our bus routes. 

route branding

Our individual route branding journey all started in 2004 when we introduced a redesigned logo and brand alongside the slogan “Quality Travel For Reading”. 

The concept was simple – make buses easier for people to navigate. We bought brand-new buses and introduced a new colour scheme. Starting on our flagship route, then known simply as ‘route 17’ but became purple 17 with its new purple and beige paintwork. This proved a great success and it is still known as purple 17 today!

In the years following, we have introduced a whole range of colours and identities including routes with colourful names such as claret 21 and yellow 26; to routes named after big cats such as leopard 3 and lion 4. 

Our unique identity for each route makes them easier to remember and our buses easy to recognise - helping improve your journey experience when you travel with us. Having individual route branding can be a tricky thing to keep going, but it benefits all our customers from regular commuters to first-time customers. It’s also of benefit to visually impaired people and visitors to our town who can be sure that seeing a striking colour from a distance is their bus!

special buses

To celebrate our 20th anniversary of route branding; we’ll be running some special buses throughout the day on a few of our bus routes. 

Several former Reading Buses vehicles will be returning to Reading for the day and operating various journeys on our purple 17, emerald 5 & 6 and berry 23 & 24 routes alongside our usual vehicles. We also still have a couple of the original buses, 805 and 806, in our fleet (still here due to the Covid-19 pandemic!) and they will be running on purple 17 as ‘normal’ buses. 

The guest vehicles will look a little different from our usual buses as they’ll be in the colours of their current owners (big thank you to Stephensons of Essex, Bluestar and Salisbury Reds for lending us these buses for the day); however, they’ll be stopping at all the usual stops along the routes. 

As part of the celebration, these buses will be free of charge to travel on and there is no need to tap on or off or show a concessionary pass. Please note, all other buses will still need to be paid for normally – only the guest buses with the special display in the front window will be free.

A timetable of these special buses can be found here.

We hope that you enjoy the celebration of route branding in Reading!