Nottingham - QMC / University - Beeston - Long Eaton - Derby
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Trent Barton is one of the very small number of significant independent bus operators in the United Kingdom. It was formed as the result of merging Derbyshire's Trent Buses with Nottinghamshire's Barton Transport.

Trent Barton employs 1,000 people in various parts of Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire, running a fleet of around 330 modern buses on a network of local routes. Trent Barton claim every single bus in the fleet is now low floor (not including coach services on the Red Arrow, Transpeak and Commuter Xprss), although occasionally a bus primarily used at sister company Notts and Derby may stray onto a Trent route, especially during university vacation periods, when large numbers of buses used on the unibus services are idle. It operates services from Manchester in the north to Loughborough in the south as well as Ashbourne, Burton upon Trent, Chesterfield, Derby, Ilkeston, Mansfield, and Nottingham.

Services

Many of the routes are branded with their own bus livery and name, with the route brand name registered as the service number. The 'rainbow' services are a group of frequent, high density services radiating from Nottingham to its outer suburbs from every 6-12 mins:

• rainbow 1 - Nottingham - Kimberley, Eastwood, then Heanor/Ripley or Alfreton
• the two - Nottingham - Ilkeston, Cotmanhay Farm every 12 mins
• the threes - Nottingham - Hucknall, Newstead, Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Sutton-in-Ashfield, Mansfield
• i4 - Nottingham - Bramcote, Stapleford, Sandiacre, Spondon, Derby
• indigo - Nottingham - Beeston, Long Eaton, Derby
  
  East Midlands Airport is served by the 24/7 skylink service, skylink offers fast journeys between Long Eaton & Nottingham (avoiding Beeston bus station) as well as carrying on from the Airport to Loughborough hourly through the day Monday - Saturday.

The company runs 'Connection' services from Nottingham to the smaller suburbs of Calverton, Cotgrave, Keyworth and Ruddington. A few services with conventional numbering still remain around local areas; the 23 in Ilkeston is one example.

In Derby, trent barton run some urban services, such as the non-stop 'Spondon Flyer' service, and 'the Mickleover' and 'the Allestree'. There are then a number of longer distance services for example 'swift' to Uttoxeter and 'the sixes' to Belper and Matlock with their unusual numbering system: 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4 and 6.X. 'the villager' services run south to Burton on Trent with the numbering system, V1, V2, V3 and V4 and a number of services run north towards Ilkeston and Heanor such as the 'black cat' and 'H1'.

trent barton also operate a number of express services around the East Midlands. These include the 'red arrow' service that takes customers (the emphasis at trent barton being on them not just being passengers) from Nottingham to Derby faster than they could go by car or even train. 'pronto' (operated jointly with Stagecoach) connects Nottingham, Mansfield and Chesterfield up to every 15 minutes while the X38 (operated jointly with Arriva Midlands) connects Derby and Burton on Trent in just 25 minutes. Services such as the Bingham 'xprss' and 'club class' run direct into Nottingham from its outer suburbs.

Many of the more popular services within the network operate through to around 3am on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

From 24 July 2011, indigo became the UK's first '24 hours a day - 7 days a week' commercial bus service.

The company has ordered new buses for several of its services. Optare Tempo SRs were ordered for the "i4 service (Derby - Nottingham). Optare Versas were ordered to replace the very old Optare Excel's that were used on "rainbow 3" this also coincided with the renaming of the service to "the threes". Optare Solo SRs for "the allestree" services and also "the ruddington connection". More buses have been ordered for the modernisation of the fleet which should be introduced in late 2012 or early 2013.

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Article from the Wikipedia article Trent barton buses, licensed under CC-BY-SA.