‘My shirt is wringing wet’: National Express bus drivers speak out about 40C conditions during heatwaves
National Express buses at Birmingham Central bus garage in Digbeth. Photograph: Anthony Devlin/AFP/Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenNational Express buses at Birmingham Central bus garage in Digbeth. Last week, the Met Office warned climate extremes were becoming the “new ‘normal’ for the UK”.Three bus drivers working in the West Midlands said the conditions in their vehicles had been “unbearable” and criticised the absence of adequate air conditioning, which threatened the safety of employees and passengers.
- ▪National Express buses at Birmingham Central bus garage in Digbeth.
- ▪Photograph: Anthony Devlin/AFP/Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenNational Express buses at Birmingham Central bus garage in Digbeth.
- ▪Last week, the Met Office warned climate extremes were becoming the “new ‘normal’ for the UK”.Three bus drivers working in the West Midlands said the conditions in their vehicles had been “unbearable” and criticised the absence of adequate
The Guardian — World publishes from United Kingdom and files mainly under world. We currently carry 2,577 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | the Guardian |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/20/national-express-bus-drivers-40c-conditions-heatwave-west-midlands |
| Publication time | Mon, 20 Jul 2026 13:51:42 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-20T14:07:44.071Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-20T14:07:44.071Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | _QW-7Wmw-wcB |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
National Express buses at Birmingham Central bus garage in Digbeth. Photograph: Anthony Devlin/AFP/Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenNational Express buses at Birmingham Central bus garage in Digbeth. Photograph: Anthony Devlin/AFP/Getty ImagesExtreme heat‘My shirt was wringing’: National Express bus drivers speak out on 40C conditions Drivers in West Midlands say buses ‘unbearable’ during heatwaves, raising employee and passenger safety fearsNeha Gohil Midlands correspondentMon 20 Jul 2026 09.51 EDTLast modified on Mon 20 Jul 2026 10.01 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on GoogleBus drivers in the West Midlands have spoken out about the “horrendous” working conditions they have experienced during heatwaves, which led to 40C temperatures in their cabs.The UK was hit by high temperatures and…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at the Guardian.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from the Guardian
