page_title: First Greater Manchester
section_title: Route branding
hierarchical_section_title: First Greater Manchester / Route branding
caption_attribution_description: Alexander Dennis Enviro 400
context_page_description: First Greater Manchester is a bus operator in Greater Manchester. It is a subsidiary of FirstGroup. It was once a major operator in the northern areas of the county competing against Stagecoach Manchester which was dominant in southern areas of the county; however in recent years it has massively scaled back its operations. It now primarily serves north eastern suburbs of Manchester, and the metropolitan boroughs of Oldham and Rochdale whilst Diamond North West and Go North West have bought up some of the company's previous depots.
context_section_description: First Greater Manchester originally branded their frequent services as an Overground. Based on the London Underground network where each frequent service is given a recognisable colour, each Overground service was also allocated its own colour line. The concept was a prominent fixture on network maps and coloured vinyls applied to the buses frequently serving those routes. However, the brand has largely been dropped. The colours still remain on network maps but the vinyls for the most part have disappeared from the fleet's vehicles. The coloured routes are those with Monday - Saturday daytime frequencies of 15 minutes or better. This has allowed services such as the 67, 98, 519, 540 and 598 to keep their coloured line despite the frequency of the service dropping under the 10 minutes minimum frequency.
  Usually, the colours are allocated randomly. However, the 180/184 was allocated the Purple line when the services were made into an Overground route in 2004 and the 184 was extended to Huddersfield replacing service 365. The extension also saw the 184 service incorporated into the Huddersfield Overground with services 348, 350 and 352 (which were later replaced by routes 181, 182, 183 and 185 to fit in with the 184) already branded as the Purple line (as had the 365 previously).
  Due to ongoing fleet modernisation most Overground services are currently unbranded, with only the 36/37, 180/184, 409, 471 and 582 having significant route branding. Route 100 was previously branded as "unmissable", route X34 branded as "Spinning Jenny" and route X35 as "Flying Shuttle", rather than with a colour line.
caption: Alexander Dennis Enviro400 showing the new branding used for services 36 and 37 in April 2013
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