The Last Bus to Saffron Bay

About

Tidewater Transit retires route 41 on Friday 6 November 2026. The Saffron Bay depot shuts at 18:00 on Saturday the seventh, the last eighteen-seat shuttle off the fleet goes to auction on Sunday morning, and the replacement is Coast Connect: cheaper, cleaner, correct about the numbers, and blind to the four hundred yards of coast road that has never had a stop on it. In the middle of it is a box of sixty-three birthday cards. A route code changed from 41 to 41A in October, a handheld kept the old one, and the cards went to the depot instead of the houses along the route. Thirty-one have been delivered by hand over five weeks. Thirty-two are in a box on the counter, and there is no longer a route code to send them back along, because the 41 was retired yesterday. So somebody has to drive the route. Arden Vahey, 68, drove the 41 for thirty-one years and stopped nine years ago, has a laminated seat card he made himself in 2011 that is wrong in nine places, and knows all nine. Joss Ferrier, 44, hosts a community radio show about a route she has never ridden and logs every stop to the second. And at each of five stops the day produces one more person who turns out to have been keeping the 41 alive in a way no document records: a newsagent's hand-written timetable, a café tab book nobody ever paid, a product owner with seven years of data and no memory of the road, a refuse collector who has driven the rural loop two hundred and forty-one times since 2009 and told nobody, and a council worker who has repainted six shelters every March for twenty-two years out of his own tin of paint. Adult contemporary comedy and an intergenerational road story. Low stakes, emotionally sharp, no villain, no death, no illness, no courtroom, no romance. The thing being lost is a bus route, and the people who will ever notice are the people who kept it alive without being paid to.

Cast

• A Arden Vahey The driver. Drove the 41 for thirty-one years, stopped nine years ago, and drives the last run because his daughter told the depot he would. no portrait yet
• J Joss Ferrier The radio host. Hosts The Long Wave on the Saffron Bay community station out of a converted church hall and has described the 41 to about thirty people for eleven years without ever having ridden it. no portrait yet
• I Ivy Pettifer The newsagent at Pettifer's Corner. Has kept a hand-written card of 41 departures in her window, updated weekly, since the printed timetable stopped, and has never charged anybody for the information. no portrait yet
• M Margo Senn The café at Bracken Gate. Has kept a tab book with forty-one years of unpaid drivers' meals in it and has never once written a figure in the money column. no portrait yet
• T Tobin Rask The product owner of Coast Connect, the app-based replacement. Holds seven years of this route's ridership, punctuality and unmet-demand data and has never been on the road. no portrait yet
• D Denny Marrable The refuse collector at Nethergill. Has driven the rural loop on Saturday mornings since April 2009, unpaid, two hundred and forty-one times, and has told nobody. no portrait yet
• W Wil Marchant Council maintenance. Has repainted six bus shelters every March for twenty-two years, unpaid and on his own initiative, out of his own tin of paint, and his own birthday card has sat in the depot pige no portrait yet
• P Pru Naylor The depot supervisor, nineteen years. Has sorted the misdirected cards by hand for five weeks and is the last person to be inside the building. no portrait yet
• G Gil Lantree The depot mechanic, twenty-two years. Signs the shuttle over at six-forty with two rules, and has named every vehicle he has ever worked on after a goddess or a weather front since 1988. no portrait yet
• M Marta Vahey Arden's daughter. Named once in narration, is on the telephone, and is never in a room. She is the reason he renewed his licence and she is extremely bad at listening. no portrait yet