Victoria Road was partially blocked this morning after a Thamesdown bus became stuck on the snowy hill.

The stricken bus made a number of attempts to climb the hill, while cars continued to try and pass the bus in both directions, although some cars heading up the hill gave up and reversed on to Hunt Street.

 

It eventually managed to free itself and make its way to the top of Victoria Road without any further problems.

 

A number of cars attempted the climb up the hill but gave up and rolled back down to Regent Circus.

The incident comes after Swindon Borough Council announced that around 200 miles of the town's road network had been gritted overnight. According to their route map Victoria Road is one of the roads covered by last night's gritting route.

The council tweeted this morning to say that after gritting the main routes, teams had been out specifically to retreat the rural routes, and some of the steeper hills in town including: "Thamesdown Drive, Penhill Valley (Minety/Ramsbury/Downton Road), Westfield Way, Marlborough Rd to hospital, Hosiptal Rd, Marlborough Rd to Old Town, Drove Road, Cricklade Street, Croft Rd, Pipers Way, Victoria Hill, Eascott Hill, Kingshill Rd, Windsor Rd, Toothill hills."

A spokesman for Swindon Borough Council said: "Our gritting crews treat all major routes in the borough when surface temperatures are likely to drop below freezing.

"They don’t just go out when it snows. It’s not always easy to predict when roads will freeze, so we receive specialised weather reports and constantly monitor the actual road surface temperature via remote weather sensing stations at two locations in the borough."

The council added that it costs around £5,000 for all vehicles and drivers to carry out a night's operation. They use 25 tonnes of salt to treat all of the main routes in the town during freezing weather, but when snow is involved the amount of salt used doubles.

He added: "We have got eight ploughs. We cannot just scrape the ploughs along the road as this would just wear the rubber blade out within minutes. Meaning we need to have at least two inches of snow on the road before the ploughs are used.

"We have over 500 salt bins in over 200 locations around Swindon. These are for use by local residents to help make pavements and slopes safer in adverse weather conditions.

"Our road salt is a specialist product that is effective at preventing freezing down to -8C for up to three days, depending on conditions, and it’s less corrosive to vehicles than the salt that was used commonly by all councils in the past.

"We concentrate on treating the routes that are most heavily used, which in Swindon is around 200 miles of highway. Swindon has over 500 miles of roads in total, which means that around half aren’t treated at all and require extra care when the weather is bad. While we do our best, we cannot guarantee the routes we do treat will always be free of ice so if you see a problem, please let us know."

More to follow.