Today's passengers are welcome to catch any bus. . . as long as it's a certain shade of blue. Whatever happened to the multi-coloured merry-go-round of days gone by?

FROM April 9, announced one of many notices stuck to the bus window, Go North-East services from Bishop Auckland would be taken over by Arriva. So another shade is drawn, another route deracinated.

Once extravagantly hued, bus travel now offers a variation on Mr Henry Ford's famous observation that customers might have any colour they wished so long as it were black.

For Ford black read Arriva turquoise, the colour of a sanatorium netty.

The timing was coincidental, some would say serendipitous. A few days earlier, Mr John Lambard from Wolsingham had sent a graphic and lengthy letter about the multi-coloured merrygo-round that was once the bus network around Bishop.

There was an appropriately jaunty map, too, routes radiating to Woodland and West Hartlepool, to Tyne and to Tees.

He recalls 20 operators with names like Dauntless, Heather Belle and Favourite Direct serving 25 routes from half a dozen different departure points; he recalls Bond Brothers and Stephenson Brothers, Eden and OK, remembers when a dupe wasn't an innocent abroad but the relief bus which every day would follow the eight o'clock from Bishop to Darlington, in order to ease the overcrowding.

"On a recent visit to Bishop Auckland bus station I was amazed and saddened by the paucity of colours and variety of buses using it, " he says.

Time was when there was Wilson's of Willington and Anderson's of Evenwood, when GB stood not for Great Britain but for Gillett Brothers, their subjects no less dutiful in their allegiance.

"I know it smacks of anorakism, " says John - anorakism and neologism - "but I felt I should get it down on paper before I forget such interesting times."

HE'D been brought up in Bishop Auckland in the 1940s and 50s, remembered Featherstones' of Hamsterley and Shaws' of Byers Green, recalled bus trips with his parents to places like North Bitchburn, High Wham and Simpasture - on the edge of what now is Newton Aycliffe, but in his childhood a wartime munitions factory, much blessed with Aycliffe Angels.

John recalls the concrete railway station, the armed polliss on guard duty - "observed with childish awe" - and Mrs Lilian Stevens, who sold cigarettes to the muck-and-bullets munitions workers from a roll-top desk in her semi-detached sitting room.

She became Newton Aycliffe's first postmistress; her daughter still has a shop in the town.

Up in High Wham, Cockfield way, they went to see Robert Blackett, drift miner and horse keeper, whose trotter called Jane Eyre became a favourite at country shows.

Mr Blackett was also in the habit of riding his hunter to the Cross Keys at Hamsterley, imbibing freely and returning by way of equine automatic pilot. Just like the Arriva, no doubt, his four-legged friend never let him down.

BISHOP Auckland became a bus town in 1912 when Mr EB Hutchinson, who'd registered four vehicles in the Lowestoft area, for some reason changed gear and moved the company to the North-East.

It became the United, remaining in Cockton Hill until 1932 when the headquarters again moved, to Grange Road in Darlington.

John remembers six stands in the Market Place, other starting places in Chester Street and South Church Road, in Princes Street and in Bondgate, outside the Sun Inn - now happily rebuilt at Beamish.

Today's services are concentrated on a fairly gloomy bus station, to which - £3.20, single - the column took itself on Tuesday.

Mr Peter Sixsmith in Shildon had also reported sightings of all manner of alien Arrivas, automotive oftcumdens, brought from the south with Go gone in order to make up the numbers - the No 1, the 12, the 88, the 104.

It looked much the same as always, only more turquoise, save for a clutch of drivers hanging around like kids on their first day at a new school, waiting to be told which classroom they were in and why everything ended in ology.

There have been teething troubles, shall we say, the language considerably more colourful than the bus fleet.

Admittedly there is still the hourly Weardale service, which may the Traffic Commissioners bless and keep for ever, admittedly a flat-pack Eden and a single Go North-East double-decker, sitting there egregiously like a conked-out cuckoo in a turquoise nest.

For the most part, in every direction, is the colour of Henry Ford's aphorism.

It could become the last bus of all: forever Arriva, amen.