Bus driver retires after 40 years
Whether they were good children, or perhaps not so good, Alastair Crosbie has a pretty good memory of those he has dropped off at school during the years.
Crosbie, who has owned and operated the Gorge Road Bus Service for almost 40 years, officially retired this week and has sold his business.
There would not be a road in Southland or Otago he had not driven, Crosbie believed.
He and his wife Elaine started the business after they bought two buses and a workshop in August 1978.
Crosbie can still remember the licence plates for both buses.
When he started driving buses at Gorge Road, there were 164 kids, now there were 40, he said.
He made the decision to retire as the administration side of the business was increasingly difficult to keep up with.
Crosbie refused to use computers, instead keeping his records and maintenance logs in handwritten books, which was at odds with constant requests from the Minis- try of Education for digital copies, he said.
When the tendering process came in about 25 years ago, they almost lost the business, Crosbie said.
The tenders were awarded to another company by the Southland Education Board, but the business didn’t have enough buses to service the school routes, he said.
‘‘We managed to get all our runs back.’’
The longest run he did was taking the Jellicoe Sea Scouts to a jamboree at Whangaparaoa.
While he got the scouts there and back no problem, the experience of driving in Auckland meant he has never gone back.
Crosbie says that, at a guess, he would have seen three generations of local kids ride on his buses throughout the years he had been driving.
His daughter Rebecca slept in a carrycot beside the bus motor from when she was about five days old, while Crosbie and Elaine drove the bus, he said.
He now plans to spend time pottering on the farm and clay bird shooting and fishing.