Monday 7 March 2016

Club Canary: Swansea City


In the second 'episode' of this series we focus on Norwich's trip to Swansea on Saturday. The club had put on a special promotion for the match to encourage fans to make the 650 mile round trip to South Wales. Not only were tickets for the game only £10, but coach travel to and from the ground was free. This caused the fixture to be very popular and in total I counted twenty-five coaches full of Canary faithful.

Fifteen coaches were provided directly from the Sanders fleet, three from Simonds of Botesdale, whilst Freestones provided two. Eastons, Reynold's of Caister and Dereham Coachways all sent one vehicle whilst a coach from Applegates and one from Coach Options Ltd were both hired privately.

As I had a ticket to the match, the photos this week were taken at Corley Services just outside Coventry. I was on the second coach to arrive which meant I was able to photograph pretty much every single vehicle in the convoy.

The first photograph shown is of Sander's latest repaint; 805 YVJ677. The VDL Bova Futura was previously registered BT08LCT and was new to Leon's Coach Travel, before passing to Weardale Travel. It was acquired by Sanders in December 2015 and made it's 'debut' transporting Norwich fans to Manchester United's Old Trafford on the 19th of that month.

The second picture depicts Simonds' newest vehicle. BF65HVP is a tri-axle version of the Mercedes-Benz Tourismo. It is seen pulling into the coach park next to some small amounts of snow on the grass to the left. 

Finally, we have one of Dereham Coachways' Volvo B12B VanHool T9 Alizees. YJ55EZE was bought new by the company in October 2005 and has seen constant use ever since.

The team travelled by plane on Friday but used King's Ferry YJ15ETR to get to the ground from their hotel as usual. For those who are interested, Norwich lost 1-0.

To see all the photos from the day, please see my flickr, and I'll leave you a list of vehicles used.

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