Every live bus report carries an identifier its operator assigned it, and we keep a note of the ones we see: which routes they worked, and when. Enter an operator's National Operator Code above — BNSM for Bee Network, SCMN for Stagecoach Manchester — or click a bus on the live map and follow the history link.
A National Operator Code identifies the legal company running the buses, and the name on the side of the bus is usually not one company. Bee Network is several operating companies working under one brand; the large national groups are divided into regional companies, so a single familiar name can be half a dozen codes.
That matters here because a vehicle identifier is only unique within one operator. Fleet number 11260 means nothing on its own — two operators can both have an 11260, and they are different buses. Every lookup on this page is therefore a pair: the operator, and the identifier they gave the vehicle.
The live feeds are a snapshot of right now. They carry no history at all, and nothing anywhere publishes where a bus was last Tuesday — so a day that goes unrecorded is gone permanently. Everything here exists because it was written down as it happened, which is also why the record starts thin and gets more useful the longer it runs.
A sighting is one position report from a vehicle. Buses report every few seconds while in service, so a single day's driving produces thousands, and the totals here run into the millions across a fleet — one day recently carried 1,964,693 position reports from 11,048 buses across 121 operators.
A high sighting count therefore means a vehicle was in service and reporting, not that it travelled further or worked harder than a lower-scoring one. A bus sitting in traffic reports just as often as one making progress. The useful signals are the days a vehicle appears and where it was last seen, rather than the raw total.
This is the sharpest difference between the two halves of the site. A bus carries equipment that transmits where it is, so a bus pin is genuinely where that bus was when it last spoke.
A train reports nothing of the kind. Its position comes from the signalling system noticing it pass a point, so a train pin means “it has passed here” and the train is somewhere beyond — on a fast line, potentially twenty miles beyond. The two look identical on a map and are completely different claims, which is why every response says which basis it is using. The rail side is covered in where the dots come from.
A vehicle missing for a day may have been off the road, working a route whose operator does not publish positions, or running with faulty equipment. The record cannot tell those apart, so an absence here is never evidence a bus did not run.
Vehicle references come from the operator, not from a national register, so their format varies — some are fleet numbers, some are registration-derived, some are internal codes. Two operators can legitimately use the same reference for different buses, which is why a vehicle is always identified with its operator alongside.
For live positions and routes see the bus pages, or operator punctuality — and why buses run early explains why a quarter of them arrive ahead of time.