The widest, seamless, 76nm (1531-1607nm) 3dB gain-band bidirectional amplifier is realised by combining an erbium-doped fluoride fibre amplifier (1531-1562nm) and a gain-flattened erbium-doped silicate fibre amplifier (1562-1607nm) in a novel configuration of gain-band separation between upstream and downstream signals. Bidirectional 10-channel WDM transmission at 2.5Gbit/s over a 250km conventional singlemode fibre is successfully demonstrated using our amplifiers as two bidirectional repeaters.