The story
Origins
In 1987, Musterphantom Limited was created by John Chadwick and Peter Shelley. £100,000 was then raised to start operations in May 1987. £75,000 of which came from Southern Vectis, with the new company ending up as a subsidiary. The new company received old Southern Vectis Bristol VRTs to start operating. Chadwick & Shelley (both former managers at Citybus) and Southern Vectis both wanted to challenge the position of Southampton Citybus, which operated most routes within Southampton.
Expansion
In October 1987, The Hants & Sussex Bus Company was purchased by Solent Blue Line, from Basil Williams. This deal was finalised on 3 October 1987.
Throughout the 1980s, the National Bus Company was privatised and forcibly demerged. The bus market as a whole was deregulated. This resulted in Hants & Dorset being broken into three new companies in 1983. One of these was Hampshire Bus, which became part of Stagecoach South in April 1987. The Southampton and Eastleigh arm of this company was then sold to Solent Blue Line on 4 October 1987. The sale included 82 buses, the Eastleigh Chickenhall Lane depot and the local routes.
After less than a year operating, the company had gone from 16 buses to over 115. It had also developed a significant network. Due to this, rationalisation was undertaken, with the company restructuring its operations. By 1988, it was in a good position to challenge CityBus. In the next five years, the company bought new vehicles, so that in 1993, 1 in 3 of its buses were new. At this point, some services started to be run under franchise by Marchwood Motorways, with them operating route '30' and '32' from Totton to Southampton. This would later expand to include route '18' and '19'. This was based out of their Totton Salisbury Road depot. Brijan Tours was also used to run some services.
Start of the Century
In 2003, Solent Blue Line carried out a rebrand, involving a new name and the launch of the Bluestar brand soon after, as a name for their core services. Bluestar services 1 and 2 launched in 2004, the 3 and 4 services commenced operations a year later, and the Waterside services 8 and 9 had fully launched by 2006.
In July 2005 Solent Blue Line was included in the sale of Southern Vectis to the Go-Ahead Group. The head office functions of the company were consolidated with those of the other Go South Coast companies, Southern Vectis and Wilts & Dorset, in Poole.
In March 2006, the company changed its legal name to Solent Blue Line. Then in October, Solent Blue Line purchased Marchwood Motorways. After the withdrawal of the Red Rocket brand on 25 February 2008, most of the company's services began to run under the Bluestar brand.
In September 2008, Bluestar commenced running City-Link, which initially was a free shuttle between Town Quay and Southampton Central Station. The two buses used on the service were Dennis Darts inherited from Enterprise, the previous operator, and were repainted in a new two-tone blue livery with the interiors re-branded.
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The service was re-branded as QuayConnect in May 2016 with a new red and white livery featuring Red Jet 6, along with free WiFi and real time departure information.
2010s
Since 2010, the fleet had undergone several updates including:
USB charging points
Tap on, Tap off (contactless payments)
Live Tracking
Low emission engines (Euro 6)
Next-stop announcements (visual and audio)
Free WiFi (Disabled)
Bluestar was awarded £0.23m in funding from the Department of Transport to roll out Wi-Fi on 120 buses, although this has now been withdrawn due to the growth in 4G and 5G usage. Contactless card payments were introduced in June 2017, on all Bluestar and Unilink buses, as part of a £1.6m investment from Hampshire County Council. Finally, Bluestar once had Smartcard called 'the Key'. This worked on all Go South Coast services. This was withdrawn in June 2023, due to low usage, alongside the high uptake of Tap on, Tap off.
Bus Trials
The company trialled a Wright StreetDeck with a set of dual doors in February 2018 whether passengers could effectively board and de-board through the front and rear doors. The bus was loaned from Brighton & Hove for trialling on Bluestar route 18. Later in November of the same year, the company unveiled 19 ADL Enviro400 Cities, replacing the single deck buses used on the route the trials took place on.
Bluestar has also been one of the test sites for new air filter technology which removes and captures particulates from the atmosphere. A test has been done in September 2018 for 100 days and has claimed to have cleaned 3.2 million cubic metres. It is planned that these will be fitted onto buses nationwide on Go Ahead's buses. To accompany this, they have also installed solar panels onto the roof of the test bus to see if the filter can be made to run on its own power. 16 more buses have been installed with solar panels to reduce maintenance costs and fuel consumption. There are 6 buses with the air filter, including the original with the prototype air filter installed on ADL Enviro200 MMC types, wearing the Bluestar "breathe" branding.
Aside from the air filter trials, the company had also carried out feasibility trials for battery electric vehicles with Southampton City council. These trials took place in June 2021.
2020s
Towards the end of November 2022, First Hampshire & Dorset announced the intention to withdraw their Southampton-based operations following low patronage levels and increased operating costs. This took place on 19th February 2023, with Bluestar adding six replacement routes to its network, servicing the areas where the former company operated.
In July 2023, Xelabus reduced their public bus network and transferred their X4 and X7 routes to the company, subsequently being renumbered to 24 and 23 respectively. During October 2024, the company gained two more services from Xelabus, renumbered to 21 and 22.
In December 2023, Bluestar had won the award of "UK Bus Operator of the Year", along with three accolades. These were awarded by the annual UK Bus award scheme, as Bluestar had won this award twice in 2017 and 2018.
During 2024, Bluestar received sixteen Enviro400 MMCs allocated mainly to routes 2 and 7, as well as eighteen cascaded single decker buses from Bournemouth. Twelve refurbished double decker buses also gradually entered service with the operator to phase out temporary buses on cross city route 19, and at a later date, route 19a.
In March 2025, the operator introduced ten double decker buses with “theone” branding to replace the existing fleet of buses operating on the Bluestar 1 route between Southampton and Winchester. The replacements offer USB charging ports, stop bells upstairs behind each seat, and brand new Euro 6 engine technology, which significantly reduces emissions from the exhaust and helps the environment.
From Wikipedia’s article on Bluestar (bus company), shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4