The North West winter season begins on the 1^st of October each year, running right through until the 15^th of May the following year. BEAR Scotland’s winter team has worked throughout the winter season to keep trunk routes in the North West of Scotland safe and clear.

Each and every day of the season, in the North West alone, we receive 29 bespoke weather forecasts covering each part of our network which are updated every 6 hours. These allow us to work out how much salt to put down, when best to spread it and when to provide extra equipment for snow clearing. So far this winter, 37280 tonnes of salt has been used to treat roads, with 4999 treatments carried out in total.

As ever, the winter service has been extremely challenging at times with the longest spells of colder weather during the latter part of December and through January. So far there have been 57 snow days. The A86 at Aberarder in the Highlands hit the lowest temperature, -11.4 Celsius, in December 2022.

Eddie Ross, BEAR Scotland’s Operating Company Representative for the North West explains, “This is the first winter we have used a new Transport Scotland specification for winter service contained in our new Network Management Contracts. Extra winter patrols are now in place and long sections of footway now benefit from pro-active salt treatments in the early morning. Our new orange fleet are also starting to come on stream which, being newer, are more reliable, better for the environment and are better equipped giving us live feedback on the road conditions.”

“Of course, our dedicated team of over 100 winter drivers are most important. Much of their good work is done when people are in bed, but their efforts make sure that we can all go about our business in all but the most extreme of conditions.”