Great Western Coffee Shop

I was staying with friends earlier this week in Lincolnshire, and caught a bus (which goes twice a day) from their village to Newark-upon-Trent to catch the train home yesterday.

This service has what I would call a 'ghost bus' accompanying it. The lease for the service changed in April and a new contractor took over operating it, but since then, another bus, operated by the company which lost the contract, follows it for the whole journey, but does not pick up any passengers. I asked my friends what they knew about it, and then asked the driver of the bus I caught if he knew why it was operating. Nobody was certain, but the strong suspicion is that there has been an error made in the contract change (possibly to do with not giving the previous operator sufficient notice about the change) and that the previous contractor still has a contract (my service's driver thought it lasted until September) to operate the service as well. So both buses run along together every day, one picking up passengers and a second bus following it along. The service is never full for one bus, so two buses are certainly not needed, and to make it feel particularly ghostly, the second empty bus is a double-decker following the single-decker running the service.

I can only surmise that because the service starts in one county (Lincolnshire) and terminates in another (Nottinghamshire) the error has occurred due to lack of communication between these.

I know we have a few bus drivers on this forum, and wondered whether this is something that has occurred elsewhere, and whether there is any other explanation of what is happening.

In West Cornwall several years ago we had a few 'ghost' services running.
They were due to hurried timetabling, and there were two vehicles on the same run a few minutes apart.
Much to some drivers annoyance, this was pointed out to one of the low level managers, and the ghost runs were ceased after a few weeks.

I've not noticed or heard of recent ghost issues locally for a long time now.

Contracts however are not in my knowledge sphere. Sorry.

Who you gonna call?