FOR months they have had two rival bus firms fighting for their fares on services running just three minutes apart.

Now bewildered passengers who want to travel between Southampton and Eastleigh face having no buses at all from next month.

Bosses at small, family-owned Black Velvet have already admitted defeat to bigger competitor Bluestar on the route that runs via Chilworth and Velmore.

After four months, they will abandon the Black Velvet B service from Monday, as reported by the Daily Echo last week.

Now, the Daily Echo can reveal that Bluestar plans to drop the route from February 22.

Black Velvet boss Phil Stockley said he is “disgusted” by the action of the larger company which he said had squeezed out his company and then left customers high and dry.

It is the latest bombshell in the bus wars saga that is developing between Black Velvet, which has been going for just a year, and Bluestar, which is owned by public transport giant Go-Ahead and has been on Southampton roads since 1920s.

The battle between the two Eastleighbased companies started in October when Black Velvet took over a route previously abandoned by its larger rival.

Bluestar immediately responded by launching a new service along the route, arriving just three minutes earlier. It also cut fares and ran a free service during its first week as a promotion.

Black Velvet conceded defeat after months of struggling, but vowed that the gloves were now off and it would attack its rivals more profitable services.

Mr Stockley said: “This just shows what the company is like. They are not interested in their passengers, they just want to establish a monopoly.

“This is such a blatant attack and should make it clear to everyone what the company is like. I am not surprised by this at all.

“We believe we are offering something better than Bluestar and we hope the public give us a chance to prove it.

“I feel sorry for the passengers they have left in the lurch.”

However Andrew Wickham, Bluestar’s operations director, said it was simply a case of too few passengers to make the route profitable.

“We realised it wasn’t working for us and we are big enough to admit we were wrong. As far as we are concerned, even with the additional passengers we may have picked up now Black Velvet has stopped its service, it wouldn’t have been enough.

“This was a purely business decision.

We didn’t do it to try and put Black Velvet out of business. We couldn’t and wouldn’t behave like that.

“It was an experiment; now a few months have gone by we have looked at it and decided not to continue it.”