Halifax Passenger Transport in the Mid-1960’s – Part Four


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262 (PXO 974) AEC Reliance MU3RV / Park Royal ‘Royalist’ C41C, new to Timpson’s, London E6.

Following the success of the previous year’s used coach purchase and with the Countryside Tour and Private Hire side doing well, a further five secondhand vehicles followed suit in 1966. Two (261/262, NRK 350 & PXO 974) had bodywork to Park Royal’s relatively uncommon and shortlived ‘Royalist’ design, 261 – like MBY 347 – being new to Bourne & Balmer of Croydon, later passing to Timpson’s, whereas 262 had been new to Timpson’s. These acquired coaches were all subject to a confusing bout of renumberings during their time. Both were rebodied with Plaxton Panorama I bodies, and passed to WYPTE, PXO 974 being briefly used by WYPTE for staff transfer between Leeds and their headquarters in Wakefield before passing through various owners before being scrapped in 1980.
Here the two are seen parked in Commercial Street on a rather miserable Bank Holiday, rather optimistically touting for business on the usually very popular Countryside Tours.

263 & 264 (TGJ 486 & 485) AEC Reliance MU3RV / Burlingham ‘Seagull Mk. V’ C41F, new to Bourne & Balmer, Croydon in 1957.
261 (NRK 350) AEC Reliance MU3RV / Park Royal ‘Royalist’ C41C, new to Bourne & Balmer, Croydon in 1955.

In addition to the two Park Royal Royalists there were also three Reliances with Burlingham Seagull Mk. V front-entrance bodies (260/263/264, TGJ 484/486/485). 260 had been new to Timpson’s, the other two (263/264) to Bourne & Balmer, Croydon, later passing to Timpson’s. These suited the Halifax livery extremely well. A further similar vehicle – with Seagull Mk.IV body – was acquired in 1968 having been new to Yelloway of Rochdale in 1956. This (200, ODK 770) was only a stopgap purchase though, and was withdrawn the following year. 260 was rebodied with a new Plaxton Panorama I body and later passed briefly to WYPTE. 263 & 264 were not rebodied and were withdrawn in 1971.
These three are pictured inside Elmwood Garage.

258 (formerly 261) AEC Reliance MU3RV / Plaxton ‘Panorama I’ C43F, chassis new 1955, body new in 1968.

NRK 350 was withdrawn by WYPTE in 1975 and sold to a dealer who retained it for many years before scrapping it. Here it is passing Skircoat Garage and turning from Skircoat Road into the lower section of Free School Lane, towards Elmwood Garage.

268 (DJX 143D) Leyland Leopard L2 / Willowbrook DP41F, new in 1966.

Back in 1964 the first two dual-purpose single deckers had materialised as 269/270 (AJX 269/270B). Based on the Leyland Leopard L2 chassis they had Willowbrook 43-seater bodies incorporating the recently introduced BET-pattern curved windscreen, but instead of the latest style of peaked domes and curved rear windows Hilditch specified the standard protruding three section destination box and the earlier design of rounded rear dome – producing a unique ‘Halifax look’ which was to be applied to all new single deckers until 1973. Externally they bore a new partially reversed livery with cream lower panels and an orange band. The interiors were in pale grey and dark green with an attractive two-tone green and red seat moquette with white ‘HPT’ monogrammed antimacassors on the headrests. A further example arrived in 1965 (267, CJX 275C), being a 41-seater and with a kind of tartan seat moquette popular on coaches at the time, and in 1966 a similar fourth one (268, DJX 143D) came along. Used on stage services as well as tours and private hire these were pleasanter Leopards than the more spartan earlier bus versions, and proved to be very useful vehicles. 269 & 270 were later repainted into bus livery, and all four passed to WYPTE, 267/269/270 being withdrawn in 1976. 268 was substantially modified for bus use by the PTE, receiving a peaked front dome, being stripped of its shiny metal external trim and the luggage boot removed, and inside the luggage racks were removed and bus seats fitted, being finally withdrawn in 1981.
268 is seen waiting to operate a local Countryside Tour when quite new, in Commercial Street – just around the corner from the department’s town centre premises in Back Commercial Street (but always referred to as Powell Street).

101 (ECP 681D) Daimler Fleetline CRG6LX/30 / Northern Counties H43/32F, new in 1966.

Following the successful demonstration of 565 CRW, a change of buying policy introduced Daimler Fleetlines into the fleet. Rear-engined double deckers had begun to appear in other places from 1958, but in 1966 they were still considered a novelty, causing many turned heads and puzzled expressions. Once again the local BET operator – Hebble Motor Services – had pipped the Corporation at the post by placing their first solitary Fleetline into service a couple of months earlier. Geoff Hilditch’s last purchases in his previous post at Great Yarmouth had been Fleetlines with Roe bodies – having a curved windscreen but flat windows in the front of the upper saloon., and he would have preferred to buy similar vehicles for Halifax. However, due to the development of new housing estates to the Rastrick side of Brighouse – an area until then only served by single deckers – it was anticipated that soon double deckers would be needed, and there was another of those low arched railway bridges to contend with. Full height bodies were reckoned to be too high, but normal low height bodies were considered to be unnecessarily low, and something inbetween was preferable. Unfortunately Roe were not able to offer an intermediate height body at the time, but Northern Counties were, and the first seven (99-105, ECP 679-685D) entered service with the Corporation in September 1966, These had the curved screen/flat upper deck window style, and the engine bustle disguised with ‘shrouds’. and the type became the standard Halifax double decker until the end. Hebble’s Fleetline – which in 1971 would be absorbed into the JOC fleet – was surprisingly similar to the Halifax examples with only detail differences, and quite unlike any other Northern Counties bodies delivered to a BET Group company.
101 is seen negotiating the bend at Lee Bridge, returning to town from Bradshaw or Queensbury on the through service to Newlands. In later years 101 was regarded by the driving staff as having the heaviest steering of any bus in the fleet.

105 (ECP 685D) Daimler Fleetline CRG6LX/30 / Northern Counties H43/32F, new in 1966.

In the early days of the Fleetline type many crew drivers – used to years of driving halfcabs with no set-back front axle – found them a handful, and there were many scrapes as they learned the hard way how to position them in tight spots. Many did not like the eerie sensation of the engine sound being thirty feet behind them or the spongy hydraulic accelerator, and the ‘easy-drive’ fingertip controlled semi automatic gearbox was all too easily abused by those less conscientious drivers. Conductors could also now all too easily stand at the front and distract the driver’s attention.
105 was the first of the type to enter service, and the writer recalls his first ride on it one Saturday afternoon on the West End Circular service, being driven by none other than manager Geoff Hilditch himself – who was accompanied by a rather nervous conductor ! Here it seen leaving Mount Tabor, approaching Sandy Fore, retracing the ill-fated 1920’s trolleybus route on its way to Wainstalls.

105 (ECP 685D)

There were 47 generally similar Northern Counties-bodied Fleetlines delivered to both fleets between 1966 and 1973. One G-registered one (290) was returned to Daimler for use as a demonstrator in Cape Town after only a brief spell in service, and an identical replacement was provided taking the same number. Hebble’s only bought-new Fleetline was taken into the JOC fleet (as 294) in 1971, along with an Alexander-bodied version (as Corporation 103) that Hebble had acquired from Yorkshire Woollen. Following the merger with Todmorden JOC in 1971, the later examples were built to a ‘proper’ lowheight specification in order that they could enter the low-roofed Todmorden Millwood Garage. More of the type were on order at the time of the WYPTE takeover in 1974, and these were eventually delivered to the Calderdale District fleet after lengthy delays – though with many changes to the original chassis and body specification. The Halifax Fleetlines eventually began to suffer structural problems around their front ends, with disturbing looking gaps appearing and windscreens prone to blowing out in high crosswinds ! The rear engine shrouds were found to be troublesome also, and so all were rebuilt in PTE days with strengthened fronts and the shrouds removed. Withdrawals commenced in 1980 and the last one served with Yorkshire Rider until 1990 (being recently acquired by a preservationist), although a few served a liitle longer as training buses.
Here 105 has now reached Wainstalls terminus beside the New Delight public house, reversed and is awaiting departure back to town and through to Causeway Foot – the borough boundary on the Keighley Road. The following year the route would be extended 200 yards along the road off the the left into the narrowest part of the village, where it would have to perform a difficult and very tight reverse on a blind corner onto to the terminus stop – typical of so many Halifax routes. This would mean a reversion to short halfcabs once more.

303 (FCP 303E) Dennis Loline III / Northern Counties H41/33F, new in 1967.

Roger had left Halifax by 1966, after which AEC Reliances – including some shortened, narrow ones to replace the Nimbuses, and more with Willowbrook DP and later Plaxton bodies, single-deck versions of the Fleetline, Seddon Pennine RU’s, Dennis Lolines and finally Leopards in their later more powerful PSU4B form, appeared on the scene. These are really beyond the scope of theis article, but he was later to pay a return visit when he photographed Loline 303 climbing Salterhebble Hill (and passing the oddly named Elephant Terrace) on its way back to town from Huddersfield. So a liitle about the Lolines.

The private hire operation had along the way secured a lucrative contract to provide works transport for hundreds of female workers between towns in the Wakefield/Barnsley/Doncaster triangle and the Meredith & Drew (later United Biscuits) factory at Ovenden – tales of the antics of these ‘ladies’ being the stuff of legend. A large fleet of single deckers including DP’s and the acquired coaches were required, but then consideration was given to replacing some of these with a lesser number of suitable double deckers in order to keep costs down and remain competitive, as the contract was renewable annually, and there were always other companies willing to jump in with a lower bid. There was also the perceived need to be able to provide appropriate double deckers for other longer distance private hire work in the future – preferably to a low height to allow for any low bridges that may have encountered. Most of the types available were unsuitable, but then thoughts turned to the Dennis Loline demonstrator that had visited in 1964. This had a Gardner 6LX engine, 4-speed semi-automatic gearbox and Northern Counties body, and had been intended for use as an overseas demonstrator, but the plan had not materialised. Further visits were arranged, then enquiries made regarding various changes to the specification – including a 5-speed gearbox – and then five were ordered. These (300-304, FCP 300-304E) came along in 1967 and were fine looking and comfortably specified vehicles, with high-backed seating, air-suspension at the rear and a fair turn of speed. Unfortunately mechanical troubles arose very soon afterwards and a Dennis service engineer was almost a resident of Halifax for quite a while as he tried to sort them out – the problems mostly arising from the complicated and congested transmission arrangements caused by the awkward fitting of the large 5-speed gearbox and transfer box in too tight a space. After only four years service it was decided to dispose of them, and they passed to the West Riding Automobile Co. who were desperately buying up Bristol Lodekkas to replace their ill-fated Guy Wulfrunians. It probably seemed that the Lolines would fit in well with the Lodekkas – from which the Loline was originally derived – and they did manage to obtain a further seven years out of them before they were finally scrapped in 1978.

In the years that followed, most of the stage operations of Hebble and all of Todmorden JOC’s were taken over- considerably enlarging the route network and bringing about the replacement of the Halifax and Todmorden JOC’s with the combined Calderdale JOC. Along with the municipal undertakings of Leeds, Bradford and Huddersfield, Halifax’s operations were taken over by the West Yorkshire PTE in 1974, Halifax being served by their Calderdale District. At deregulation in 1986 a buyout by WYPTE directors led to the privately owned Yorkshire Rider, this in turn being bought out by Badgerline Holdings, then this by the Grampian Regional Transport Group leading to the formation of FirstBus. At first using the local identity of Calderline, FirstBus soon imposed its corporate look and it is only in the last year or so that the ‘Halifax’ local identity has reappeared. First Halifax has in recent years reduced dramatically in size, with very many of its routes being given up – due either to competition from local small operators, or New-Kid-on-the-Block CentreBus/Yorkshire Tiger outbidding them on tendered work.

Throughout this article reference to the following must be acknowledged:

‘Steel Wheels and Rubber Tyres’, Vol. Two, by Geoffrey Hilditch (The Oakwood Press, 2004)

‘Halifax Passenger Transport From 1897 to 1963’, by Geoffrey Hilditch (The Oakwood Press, 2006)

‘Fleet History of Halifax Corporation….etc. ‘ (PSV Circle publication PB23, 1990)

All photographs by Roger Cox unless otherwise stated.

Text by John Stringer.


01/08/14 – 10:26

What a great article on Halifax by Roger Cox and John Stringer. Well done to you both.
In Part 1 they mention the 4 PD2s which went to Oldham in 1965 to assist with the vehicle shortage caused by the well known ‘Ministry’ fleet check.
The four were ACP 385, ACP 388, ACP 390 and ACP 392 given Oldham Fleet Nos. 465, 469, 470 and 467 respectively.
I have dug out a selection of pictures from my collection, of them working in Oldham.

Stephen Howarth

ACP 385 fleet number 465, exiting Wallshaw Street Garage crossing the appropriately named Car Street to take up a service 5. 302 EBU was the departments Land Rover. The garage exit is 54ft wide

ACP 385 again in a withdrawn condition in the yard at Wallshaw Street Garage

ACP 388 fleet number 469 seen here heading up a line of Football Specials waiting for ‘Latics’ fans to return after a match.
‘X’ was the service designation used for special workings and Depot journeys.

ACP 392 fleet number 467, with chromed radiator, parked at the rear of Wallshaw Street Garage. Next to it on the right is CBU 127C a Leyland Atlantean with Roe H43/34F bodywork

A line up of withdrawn ex Halifax buses. From the left ACP 388, ACP 390 and ACP 390 Fleet Numbers 469, 465 & 470. The bus far left is 108 HBU which overturned in an accident with a tanker on 3rd November 1967, its remains were to remain well into SELNEC days. 075 BU is ‘The Red Biddy’ tow truck.


02/08/14 – 06:24

A very interesting article with superb photographs by Roger. I always found the routes around Halifax fascinating; what other municipal fleet operated to such interesting places as Booth, Midgeley, Heptonstall, Steep Lane, Rishworth and Mill Bank, not to mention the ex-Hebble routes to Rochdale and Burnley. What a pity that these routes are nowadays mostly operated by Optare Solos.
Stephen, I am puzzled by your statement that ACP 385 became Oldham Corporation 465; According to David Wayman’s 1997 book “Oldham Corporation Buses” and also from my own memories, this bus was Oldham 468, and on your “after withdrawal” photo the fleet number looks like 468. David Wayman’s book shows Oldham 465 as ex-Sheffield LWE 110.

Don McKeown


12/08/14 – 05:52

One can only say one thing about this article, absolutely excellent.
Here is two more interesting place names that could be found on Halifax destinations Hubberton and Cunning Corner.

Trevor Knowles


12/08/14 – 15:16

The last Halifax Fleetline is currently in store at Keighley bus museum awaiting restoration. There is a recent shot of it on www.sct61.org.uk

Chris Hough


13/08/14 – 07:14

Just look at the photo’ of Dennis Loline 303 above: “Crossfield Bus Station”! – just how parochial is that? I never heard anybody refer to the old Halifax Bus Station as Crossfield Bus Station (despite the fact that’s what the signage on it side used to boldly-state) And doesn’t the style of lettering imply “Crossfield: Bus Station”? not very helpful for strangers is it?? . . . or even for the uninitiated in Huddersfield, from where the bus has just come.
Interesting is the continuation of orange along/over the near-side front mud-gard, to match the off-side from the front . . . I’ve never seen that before.

Philip Rushworth


13/08/14 – 13:06

Smiths of Reading ran ACP 627 and ACP 630 until 1964-5. They went beautiful and were the first preselects I’d ever driven. The good-looking, rationally laid out Roe bodies were the icing on the cake.

Ian T


14/08/14 – 06:52

Thank you Ian T. for posting the photos of the Halifax Regent III whilst with Smith’s of Reading. Though I have black and white photos of them they don’t do them justice, and its very nice to see what they looked like in colour.
As you say they were nice buses. Having been withdrawn way back in 1958, Smith’s bought them from North’s the Yorkshire dealer in 1959 and got good service out of them, running them until 1965.
Smith’s also bought one of the Park Royal-bodied Regents at the same time, but from the London dealer A.M.C.C. ACP 410, formerly HJOC 226 ran with Smith’s until 1963.

John Stringer


04/02/15 – 10:23

I feel that it’s about time that I expressed my thanks publicly to John Stringer for his superb articles on Halifax Passenger Transport. There is much within that I did not know, not only in respect of the public transport scene, but also of the socio-economic history of this extraordinary area of West Yorkshire. The credits for these Halifax articles are given in reverse order – John’s name should definitely be first. During my limited time in the Yorkshire area in the mid 1960s, plus occasional visits in later years, I took a number of pictures of Yorkshire and Lancashire operators, and these shots subsequently languished unseen in my possession for up to half a century. When I came across OBP, it seemed the ideal place to share some of my photos, but, in the cases of both the white and red rose counties, I lacked the background knowledge to pen a meaningful accompanying text – simply stating the obvious seemed decidedly inadequate. I therefore decided to try to approach those OBP contributors whose credentials in this area were clearly impeccable. My first collaboration was with Phil Blinkhorn, and I was extremely gratified by the welcoming reception that Phil gave to my idea. The superbly written, expansive articles that Phil supplied to go with my Manchester area pictures may be found elsewhere on OBP, and I cannot thank him enough. Emboldened by this result, I approached John Stringer with a proposal for a similar project in respect of Halifax. John’s exceptional knowledge of the area was clear from his perceptive contributions to OBP, and his positive response was splendid. I am very glad that my pictures from many years ago should have lately become the catalyst for such detailed and enlightening articles from Phil and John.
When I arrived from Croydon, after four and a half years with London Transport at Reigate, to take up the position of Traffic Clerk in Halifax in December 1964, I possessed only a motor cycle licence – I hadn’t even driven a car. My first experience behind the wheel of a Halifax bus took place early in 1965 in PD2 ACP 391, originally No.107 until an unscheduled encounter with the Greetland railway bridge in 1963 resulted in its subsequent emergence as an open topper for driver training and tree lopping purposes. By then, this bus was almost 18 years old, and its later career as a trainer had effectively removed much of the remaining synchromesh in the gearbox. My initial attempts probably helped this process along quite dramatically. On my first trip out, Instructor Arthur Brearley took it up to Saville Park, or “The Moor” as it was locally known, and handed it over to me in, if my recollections are correct, Manor Heath Road. I got it up to third gear and proceeded ahead cautiously without incident in a westerly direction, but he then told me to turn left at (I think) Queens Gate. As a bus enthusiast almost from the nappy stage, I knew that turning the corner with a bus required several rotations of the steering wheel, and, after dropping down efficiently into second gear, I attempted to undertake this manoeuvre, only to discover that Leylands were not designed to be steered by seven stone weaklings. I managed to shift direction by about ten degrees, before mounting the grass and mercifully stalling the thing. After that inauspicious start, matters could only improve, and I felt that I had mastered the heaviness of Leyland controls until we went out in Leopard No.231. I pulled away from Skircoat Road in second gear and then found that I couldn’t move the gearstick at all. I was told that the gearbox in this bus, which was effectively the prototype Leopard, was virtually solid until the oil and internals had warmed up, and even then a course of muscle building steroids would greatly assist the process. Thankfully, the later Leopards, despite heavy controls, were rather better. The Worldmasters were straightforward to drive once one got used to the marked delay in the response from the gearbox to movements of the selector lever. Somewhat later, when a couple of ex Sheffield AEC Monocoaches arrived, I found these to be very much nicer in every respect than the single deck Leylands.
When still under training, we went out one day in a Nimbus, and I took to this little bus instantly. All the controls were light, and the six speed gearbox responded to sympathetic and gentle treatment. This was in complete contrast to the brute force often required with the Leylands that predominated in the fleet, and the majority of drivers seemed unable to adapt their technique to suit the Nimbus. The little Albions were almost universally despised by the driving force, and when they were despatched elsewhere owing to their mechanical fragility, staff morale rocketed dramatically. I, however, loved them, and was always ready to work a vacant Heptonstall duty with one. Happily, I reacquainted myself with the Nimbus a few years later when moonlighting at weekends for North Downs around Horsham.
I tended to differ from the majority view in respect of other types also. To the average driver, if such a creature exists, the “best bus” is the fastest bus. Because of the exceptionally severe gradients found in much of the territory, the Halifax bus fleet had differentials of about 6.5 :1, which placed a distinct limitation upon maximum speed. The PD2s/PD3s/Regent IIIs/Daimler CVL6s would do about 36-38 mph, the Regent Vs about 40mph (with an accompanying racket that suggested more like 60mph), but the CVG6s resolutely refused to exceed 32mph, even downhill. In contrast to the loosely governed 1800 maximum rpm of the AEC and Leyland engines, the Gardner 6LW was rigidly governed to 1700 rpm and had an all speed governor which was set by the accelerator pedal. For example, pressing the pedal halfway would set the governor to, say, 1300 rpm, and once the engine reached that speed the governor would cut in, the effect being felt by the driver by the noticeable increase in the resistance of the accelerator to foot pressure. One could feel the resistance build up under one’s foot as the engine speed increased. The Gardner governor was extremely effective, and nothing would induce the engine to exceed the 1700 rpm maximum, so charging downhill for extra speed to make up time, always possible to some degree with the other types, did not work with a CVG6. Adding to this the engine’s modest 112 bhp, and the occasional unpredictability of the spring loaded preselector (it could really hurt when the pedal came out ‘half a mile’), there resulted a combination of features that did not make for a bus popular with the driving staff. Ever perverse, I, a strong Gardner fan, loved them, particularly the later Roe bodied examples, and tried to get one whenever possible. I recall taking over a Hebden Bridge bound Regent V in George Street one Saturday, where the departing driver warned me that the engine was leaking exhaust fumes into the cab. Rather than run late or lose mileage, I took the thing on, and soon regretted doing so. Back at Crossfield Bus Station on the return trip to Brighouse, and dizzyingly high on carbon monoxide, I sought a replacement from the bus park, and was told to take whatever I liked. From a choice of an old Regent III, a PD2 and a CVG/Roe, I picked the Daimler, and off we went, not entirely to the satisfaction of the conductor who now had an open platform rather than a cosy folding door. Sadly, there was some kind of parade in Brighouse and we were seriously delayed before leaving again for Halifax where we were to be relieved. Nothing I could say to the relieving driver would convince him that our late arrival was down to congestion in Brighouse. To him, it was the fault of the ‘slow Daimler’, and he couldn’t understand why I hadn’t taken absolutely anything else instead from the bus park as a replacement for the dodgy Regent V. He departed for Hebden Bridge in high dudgeon, and such minimal stock as I possessed thus plummeted further. The ‘B’ (Joint Committee) fleet always seemed to owe mileage to the ‘A’ (Corporation) fleet, and, in retrospect, I can see that I contributed to this imbalance by choosing Roe Daimlers as replacements for faulty ‘B’ fleet AECs and Leylands whenever I could.
Geographically, the old Halifax Borough was a place encompassing extraordinary contrasts. To the south, the boundary ran through urban development on the brink of the Calder valley, quite close to the town centre, whereas, to the north and west, the borough swept out to embrace swathes of wild Pennine moorland. Though I did often drive on the Corporation ‘A’ services when covering duties on the road, my preference was for the out of town ‘B’ services, particularly the Brighouse – Hebden Bridge 48/49 routes, which were normally the province of the PD3 and Regent V 30 footers. The PD3 was by far the quieter beast of the two, and the more predictable, except in the braking department. Why Leyland, back in its Spurrier days, never attended to the serious lack of retardation in this chassis is surely astonishing. The Regent V brakes were snatchy and poorly progressive, but they were a bit better than the Leyland effort. Even so, on my sundry trips into Bradford as a passenger by Hebble Regent V, my knuckles would go white gripping the handrail as the bus plummeted headlong down the gradients along the Queensbury route. Unlike those sitting nonchalantly around me, I knew just how borderline such driving techniques really were. Only subsequently, on reading the reminiscences of Geoffrey Hilditch on the subject of Hebble maintenance standards, did I realise that my disquietude on those occasions fell well short of reality. The Regent V had light, positive steering and a fully synchromesh gearbox, but the howl from the latter in concert with the raucous engine played havoc with the eardrums. I was not a fan. By contrast, the PD2 was a fundamentally sound piece of machinery and taking one along the windy ridge to Queensbury or up the slopes above the Calder and Ryburn valleys to places such as Barkisland, Midgley, Norland, Sowerby et al, was eminently satisfying, especially on those sadly rare climatic occasions when clear views might be had across the dramatic scenery. It was all so long ago now, but I cannot imagine being enthused today by a driving duty around Halifax in any of the modern mechanical nonentities.

Roger Cox


06/02/15 – 07:00

Thanks Roger for your kind words. It was a pleasurable trip down memory lane for me.

Phil Blinkhorn


06/02/15 – 07:00

I always appreciate both John’s and Roger’s postings regarding HPT. The Halifax Fleetlines pictured in this thread have that elaborate Daimler badge at the front – which I believe Daimler charged extra for . . . and which one operator refused to pay for, and refused to return the removed badges until the cost was deducted from the invoice. There are some Oldham PD2s pictured on one of the threads: I was driving though Oldham today, and at the A62/IRR roundabout the First Wright-thingy in Oldham heritage livery went past – I must say that the pommard-cream livery looked superb (I can think of better liveries, but in comparison to the battleship-grey “dazzle” camouflage that is First’s most recent livery . . .)

Philip Rushworth


06/02/15 – 17:11

Very pleasing to read that First had made some effort to recognise Oldham’s centenary.
That’s in marked contrast to Stagecoache’s apathy on the subject of Stockport’s centenary of bus operations in 2013 (perhaps they thought that trolleybuses don’t count!)

Orla Nutting


07/02/15 – 06:14>

Living not far from Halifax I found this of great interest, although I’ve only briefly driven a bus, and that in the Barnsley area.
First has several buses in heritage liveries in South and West Yorkshire and others in Leicester and Swansea. There may well be others. The First Manchester website has a heritage page with a brief note on the operators (municipal plus LUT) whose liveries they are commemmorating.

Geoff Kerr


07/02/15 – 06:15

I must thank Roger for asking me to collaborate with the article, and for his appreciative comments, and also to thank all those others who have commented favourably. Thank You.

John Stringer


18/01/17 – 17:39

How fantastic to read something as well written as this.
Thank you guys so much for sharing your thoughts and giving such a tremendous set of historical references.
My only regret – I have only just now found the articles on the site.
I am inspired to continue documenting/publishing my recently discovered notebooks from the 1960’s.
Thanks again to all concerned, good job!

Stuart Emmett

If you have not read this article from the beginning, click here, you won’t be disappointed.

Halifax Passenger Transport in the Mid-1960’s – Part Three

Not read this article from the beginning, click here

423 (LUA 423) AEC Regent III 9612E / Roe H31/25R, new to Leeds City Transport (423) 1947. (Photo – John Stringer)

There was a severe delay in the delivery of more PD2’s intended for 1964/65, due to a protracted labour dispute at Weymann’s. Some vehicles that were due to replaced had to be given a reprieve, but others needed to go and this led to a vehicle shortage. Consequently four Roe-bodied Regent III’s formerly in the Leeds City Transport fleet were purchased from North’s, the dealer, in July1964 to help out for a while – remaining in their mostly dark green livery with the lighter green window surrounds repainted with Halifax cream. One was allocated to the Corporation fleet (40, LUA 440), and three to the JOC (420/422/423, LUA 420/416/423), a further example (49, LUA 427) being added to the Corporation fleet in the November. Leeds C.T. were well known for their policy of derating vehicles for economy purposes and this became obvious when these had to work hard fully laden in Halifax’s terrain. Consequently they were unpopular with crews and passengers alike – not only due to their lack of urge, but also their lack of heaters and generally sombre appearance compared to the cheerful indigenous buses. Whenever possible they tended to be mostly confined to schools and peak period services. 40 passed briefly to the JOC in 1965 as 440, but all were withdrawn by the end of the year.
423 is seen leaning on the bend from Godley Cutting into Godley Road, having just passed under Godley Bridge, as it works a schools journey towards town. To the left can be seen an example of Halifax’s other double deckers – the double-decker houses once so familiar on the steep hillsides, with the lower two floors being one house accessed from the main road, and the upper one or two facing the opposite way being accessed from a street at a higher level round the back. Those pictured were all swept away in the late 1960’s along with many hundreds of other nearby properties in order to create a derelict wasteland overrun with rosebay willow herb.

200 (MBY 347) AEC Reliance MU3RV / Park Royal C41C, new to Bourne & Balmer of Croydon in 1954.

It was Geoff Hilditch’s desire from soon after arriving at Halifax to develop the Tours and Private Hire business. Having cancelled two from an order for PD2 double deckers and replaced them with a pair of smart new dual-purpose Willowbrook-bodied Leopards in a revised livery, he then wished to equip two of the Nimbuses similarly. This Reliance coach had been in the fleet of Bourne & Balmer of Croydon , and later BET subsidiary Timpson’s – but had been sold to Holloway of Scunthorpe, with whom it received frontal damage in an accident. Sold to North’s, the dealer, it came to the notice of Hilditch who in 1965 is said to have then acquired it for a modest sum with a view to using the seats to reseat a Nimbus. Instead it was repaired by his bodyshop with a modified frontal treatment and put into service as coach 200 (MBY347). After a spate of renumberings it was rebodied with a new Plaxton Panorama I body, ending up as 256. It passed to WYPTE which used it as a mobile sales outlet for their new MetroCard. It passed briefly in 1976 to a preservationist, then becoming a stock-car transporter for a few years more.
Here it is pictured awaiting attention in the dockshop at Skircoat Garage with a CVG6 behind.

19 (TWJ 505) PRV/AEC Monocoach MC3RV / Park Royal B44F, new to Sheffield JOC (1205) in 1955.

In 1965 to help further with the ongoing shortage, North’s supplied two of these relatively uncommon Monocoaches (19/20, TWJ 505/506) which had been part of the Sheffield JOC fleet. The Monocoach was technically a Park Royal product – effectively an integrally constructed (chassisless) version of the more common Park Royal-bodied Reliance to which it bore a strong resemblance. Cautious and conservative bus engineers were not convinced at that stage of the merits of integral construction and tended to give them a wide berth, though they were favoured by the Scottish Bus Group. These two had all the usual early Reliance type growling sound effects, and with their mostly dark red interiors and floral seat moquette felt from a passenger’s point of view more like they were riding on a Hebble, rather than a Corporation bus. Transferred to the JOC in 1967 as 219/220, they were withdrawn in 1969.
19 is pictured at the bottom of Bradford Road, Stump Cross, where the Bradford road joins the A58 from Leeds at an acute angle – coming in on the right side of the photo. Before the installation of traffic lights in the mid-1960’s this was a serious accident blackspot, with collisions occurring often several times a week. It is returning from Northowram Village and will then operate across town to the General Hospital. A familiar and nostalgic scene for the writer who in his young childhood days lived only 100 yards away from here.

65 (CCP 165C) Leyland Titan PD2/37 /Roe H37/28F, new in 1965.

There were 30 Weymann-bodied PD2/37’s on order for 1964/65 (eight for the Corporation and seven for the JOC in each year), two as already mentioned being cancelled in favour of a pair of Leopard DP’s. The strike at Weymann’s dragged on, none being delivered in 1964, and eventually Roe agreed to body ten of them in 1965. The chassis were stored at Elmwood Garage for quite a while before being despatched to Leeds, from where they reappeared as eight for the Corporation (59-66, CCP 159-166C) and two for the JOC (278/279, CCP 523/524C). With bodies that were in effect forward-entrance versions of the 1956 Daimlers, they were most handsome vehicles, having the front destination and number blinds in three separate apertures – which was to be the standard for double deckers from then on. They featured a new seat moquette pattern specially commissioned from Holdsworth’s (whose mill was situated just behind Elmwood Garage) incorporating the orange, green, cream and black colours of the bus livery, with green vynide trim – also to become standard until 1973. The interior was in Roe’s familiar olive green with metallic grey window surrounds, the doors had full depth glazing, and there was a return to rear route number indicators – not specified since the Daimlers. They had excellent visibility for the driver with deep cab windows, and the bodies remained sound and rattle-free throughout their lives. All passed to WYPTE, 66 going in 1976, most in 1978/79 but 62 surviving until 1980 – being the penultimate halfcab. Three were converted to training buses, one being sold off as surplus by the PTE, but the other two passing to Yorkshire Rider – the writer as an Instructor having the distinction of having trained the last driver to pass their PSV Test on the last one the day before it was withdrawn in 1990. One (62) was exported to Denver, Colorado where it may still exist, otherwise sadly none survived into preservation.
In the picture, though still a fairly new service bus, L-plated 65 is being used for training purposes, and is standing in Heath Road, opposite Skircoat Road Garage – which is just out of view to the right. Incidentally the writer passed his PSV test on similar bus 59 !

280 (CJX 320C) Leyland Titan PD2/37 / Weymann H36/28F, new in 1965

The balance of the order for Weymann-bodied PD2’s finally began arriving towards the very end of 1965. There were ten for the JOC (280-289, CJX 320-329C) and in early 1966 came the remaining eight for the Corporation (67-74, DCP 67-74D). They featured the recessed windscreen as used on the 1963 PD3’s, but the interiors were in green with pale grey formica and the new special moquette. These and the Roe-bodied PD2’s were generally regarded as far superior to the earlier Leylands, 280-289 also being the fastest of them all for some reason. Just prior to the formation of WYPTE, 68 was turned out in a proposed ‘Calderdale District’ livery of cream with orange relief, but this was rejected. Then with 67 and a variety of other vehicles it appeared in a Hilditch-designed livery of dark green and cream – which was also firmly rejected. After the takeover a universal buttermilk and verona green livery was adopted, and applied somewhat uncomfortably to many of the older vehicles. Most were withdrawn in 1978, 282 being the last vehicle to operate in the green, orange and cream livery – albeit rather faded by then.
280 is seen here at Salterhebble, having just descended the short but sharp Salterhebble Hill about a mile and a half from town on the Huddersfield Road, from which it will shortly bear right at the Calder & Hebble junction and aim for West Vale and its hilltop village destination of Stainland.

An unidentified PD2 of the 280-289 batch

Another of the same type is seen in wintry conditions climbing Upper Bolton Brow opposite Crow Wood Park on the upper fringe of Sowerby Bridge only a couple of hundred yards before crossing the borough boundary into Halifax. It is returning from Tuel Lane to town.

Demonstrator 565 CRW – Daimler Fleetline CRG6 / Alexander H44/34F, new in 1963.

When Geoff Hilditch arrived at Halifax his predecessor had already placed orders for Leyland double-deckers for 1964/65 delivery. He has said that had this not been the case he would have preferred to have bought Roe-bodied Daimler CVG6LX’s, but considering purchases beyond 1965 he set about arranging visits by a host of all the available demonstration vehicles he could muster. During 1964 there were double decker demonstrations by a Daimler Fleetline, two different Leyland Atlanteans, AEC Renown and RMF Routemaster, Guy Arab V and Dennis Loline. For further comparison the Department included its own Leyland re-engined CVG6 (92), a PD3 (206) and a Regent V (218) in the ‘competition’. The Routemaster was certainly the most favoured by the staff – both engineering and driving – and achieved the best score in the maintenance cost calculations, though at nearly £4,000 more than the Fleetline or Atlantean it was never going to be a serious contender. The Leyland-engined CVG6 achieved the best fuel consumption score, but rear engines were considered the way to go and though five Lolines eventually came our way to fill a special need, the Fleetline otherwise became the choice for new double deckers from 1966.
Alexander-bodied Fleetline 565 CRW paid three visits altogether, and here it is seen second time around near King Cross on the long Hebden Bridge-Brighouse service.

West Yorkshire R.C.C. SRG15 (HWU 641C) Bristol RELL6G / ECW B54F, new in 1965.

Having tried all the double decker demonstrators and made a decision which to go for, Hilditch turned his attention the following year to single deckers. Once again the local public were treated to a variety of types, including a Leyland Panther and Panther Cub, AEC Swift and two Daimler Roadliners – both bus and coach versions. One vehicle that paid a visit for inspection but was not used in service was this West Yorkshire Bristol RELL6G with the original design of ECW bus body. Prior to this the state-owned Bristol company had for many years only been allowed to sell its products to state-owned operators, but an exchange of shares between the Bristol and Leyland companies allowed them to get around this restriction and there was then a push to sell them on the open market. Generally regarded as the best of all the rear-engined single deck models of the 1960’s, at that point there was no shorter length Bristol to suit Halifax’s operating terrain anyway, and unfortunately none ever came Halifax’s way.
It is seen here parked just inside the front of Elmwood Garage, with – yet again – Regent III 373 looking on.

All photographs by Roger Cox unless otherwise stated.

Text by John Stringer.

Part Four, click here

Halifax Passenger Transport in the Mid-1960’s – Part Two

Not read this article from the beginning, click here

4 (KCP 4) Leyland Royal Tiger Worldmaster RT3/1 / Weymann B43F, new 1958. (Photo – John Stringer)

One-man-operation was brought in on a more serious scale in 1958 when the Siddal, Norton Tower and Washer Lane routes were converted. To provide for this nine new single deckers were required. Manager Le Fevre was very much a Leyland man, but their current standard underfloor-engined offering – the Tiger Cub – was far too underpowered to be considered any good for local use. Once the Tiger Cub had become Leyland’s standard home market model the previous heavyweight Royal Tiger had then been substantially revised and upgraded specifically for overseas markets – the result was the Royal Tiger Worldmaster. Now fitted as standard with Pneumocyclic semi-automatic transmission and air brakes and generally to a longer length than current UK regulations would allow, Leyland did list – but didn’t seem to promote – a shorter version to UK specification suitable for bodies of 30 feet. Halifax purchased nine (1-9, KCP 1-9) and had them fitted with these basic but workmanlike Weymann B42F bodies. The model remained uncommon in Britain, Glasgow taking the largest number – similar, but dual-doored – and there were coaches for Ellen Smith of Rochdale and Gliderways of Smethwick. They were mechanically indestructible and just ran and ran without hassle for many years – in the end it was probably only corrosion from heavily salted roads that secured their fate. They all passed to WYPTE in 1971 and withdrawals began in 1975, two passing to an operator in the Irish Republic. The very last one (2, by then 3372) hung on until 1979. An attempt was made to repatriate one on those from Ireland, but sadly it was to no avail.
4 is pictured on a gloomy day returning from Norton Tower, and in the process of turning from Victoria Street into St. James Road, which ran across the the top of the original Crossfield Bus Station.

207 (KCP 16) Leyland Titan PD3/4 / Metro-Cammell H40/32F, new in 1959.

Le Fevre’s first order for double deckers materialised in early 1959 when eight Leyland Titan PD3/4’s with Metro-Cammell ‘Aurora’ bodies arrived for the JOC (201-208, KCP 10-17). They were the first double deckers in the fleet to the recently permitted length of 30 feet, and the first with forward entrances – though local BET operator Hebble had beaten them to it the previous year with a pair of AEC Regent V’s with similar bodies. They also marked a reversion to manual gearboxes – much to the dismay of many of the drivers. Like the Worldmasters they featured a revised destination layout with destination, via and number blinds all contained within a single aperture. They largely took over the role of the 1948 Regent III eight-footers and were concentrated on the Brighouse-Hebden Bridge and Huddersfield routes. Also like the Worldmasters their interiors were of a more basic nature then hitherto with much painted metal and leatherette seats, but they were pleasant buses to ride on. All survived into WYPTE ownership, but by then body corrosion was advancing rapidly, withdrawal commencing in 1975, the last survivor – by then 3203 – succumbing in 1976.
207 is seen here passing over the brow of Godley Lane within Godley Cutting which cuts through the north-western end of Beacon Hill. It is about to pass under Godley Bridge, a steel structure which replaced the previous arched stone bridge in 1900 in order to allow the passage of trams, which had also required the widening of the cutting. After this the road swings to the right and descends New Bank before turning across North Bridge into the town. It is on the JOC’s then longest route, from Brighouse to Hebden Bridge via Halifax.

216 (LJX 216) AEC Regent V 2D3RA / Metro-Cammell H40/32F, new in 1960.

More thirty-footers entered the fleet in 1960, but this time there was a reversion to the products of Southall. The 16 AEC Regent V 2D3RA’s had AV590 engines and all-synchromesh gearboxes with hydraulic clutches, and virtually identical bodies to the previous year’s PD3’s. There were eight each for the Corporation (11-18, LJX 11-18) and the JOC (211-218, LJX 211-218). The Corporation ones gravitated mostly to the Mixenden/Highroad Well routes for many years, whilst the JOC ones operated the same routes as the PD3’s. Opinions differ widely as to the relative merits of this model compared to the PD3, but they were generally considered to be less durable and were certainly much noisier. Injector pipes would often blow off, clutches would frequently lose their hydraulic pressure and fail to operate, and the bonnet lids were prone to blowing open in high cross winds ! Halifax’s final GM Geoff Hilditch certainly was not at all keen, and at the first opportunity they were sent packing – though several passed into the hands of independents – most of them being beautifully repainted into their new owners’ liveries by the Skircoat Road paintshop as part of the deal. The last ones were withdrawn by WYPTE in 1976, 215 passing eventually to Tony Blackman – owner of Regent III 277 – for preservation, though it has been in storage for many a year now.
Like 207 in the previous photo it is seen here in Godley Cutting heading for town on the Brighouse-Hebden Bridge through service.

221 (MCP 221) Leyland Titan PD2/37 / Metro-Cammell H36/28F, new in 1960

Later in 1960 a further 16 double deckers entered service. Owing to the 30-footers being considered unsuitable for many of the off-the-main-road routes, these reverted to the shorter 27-foot length, being Leyland Titan PD2/37’s again with Metro-Cammell bodies. Once more they were split equally between the Corporation (21-28, MJX 21-28) and the JOC (221-228, MCP 221-228). 27 was exhibited at the Commercial Motor Show that year and carried a plaque to that effect in the lower saloon. These, weighing nearly half a ton less than the equivalent PD3 yet having the same engine, were livelier performers on the local hilly routes, though the ride was distinctly choppier. They, and other similar later examples, did a lot of hard work around Halifax and the Calder Valley and could be considered the workhorses of the fleet throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s. First to go was 225 which didn’t quite make it into WYPTE ownership, but the rest did – most going in 1976 by which time they were pretty worn out.
221 is pictured in Stainland Road heading towards West Vale, and passing under the strongly arched railway bridge beside the former Greetland Station (closed 1962) on the 1841 Manchester & Leeds/L&YR Calder Valley line. As illustrated here double deckers have to pass through the arch in the centre of the road to avoid colliding with it. Leyland-bodied PD2/1 107 unfortunately did just that in 1963 and due to the damage caused was subsequently cut down for use as a tree-lopper and driver trainer.

33 (PJX 33) Leyland Leopard L1 / Weymann B42F new in 1962. (Photo – John Stringer)

As more operators decided that Leyland’s Tiger Cub was too underpowered but that the Worldmaster was rather too substantial, the company compromised and fitted an O600 engine to what was essentially a Tiger Cub chassis and from this evolved the first Leopards. In 1961 the JOC took a solitary example (231, OCP 231) based on the L2 coach variant, and with a Weymann body similar to those on the Worldmasters. This one however was delivered as a dual-door standee bus, but trade union opposition quickly put paid to any such idea. It lived a brief and shadowy existence in this form mostly banished to the Brighouse to Field Lane local service, until being returned to Weymann in 1963 to be rebuilt as a standard single door 42-seater. It originally had a notoriously difficult gearbox which was eventually replaced by an improved unit.
Further extensions of OMO were to take place in 1962, and so a further 16 Leopards came along – this time the L1 bus version – with single door bodies otherwise similar to 231. There were nine for the Corporation (31-39, PJX 31-39) and seven for the JOC (232-238, PJX 232-238). These allowed conversion of the Northowram, Shibden, Southowram and Brighouse via Southowram routes and replacement of the Regal III’s on the Elland-Sowerby Bridge and Elland-Ripponden routes. Quite basic and noisy inside, and with heavy, clunky driving controls they could be hard work to drive for a full shift on tightly timed, hilly, stop-start local routes, but once ‘got going’ they could ‘motor on a bit’ with a distinctive exhaust crackle.
Withdrawn by WYPTE between 1976 and 1981, two (35 & 232) have passed into the hands of local preservationists and are regular rally participants.

Leopard 33 – appropriately on route 33 – is seen leaving the former Shibden terminus and carefully negotiating the single track Paddock Road on the short-lived extension to Queensbury, introduced in 1967 and withdrawn in 1971. For the next mile or so the route would be mostly like this with just the occasional passing place, before joining the main A644 for the last section – with a deviation through Hunger HIll Estate – into its hilltop village destination.

248 (PJX 248) Leyland Titan PD2/37 / Metro-Cammell H36/28F, new in 1962.

A further sixteen PD2/37’s similar to the previous ones came along in 1962 – once again eight each for the Corporation (41-48, PJX 41-48) and the JOC (241-248, PJX 241-248). The main differences from the previous ones was the neater interior window frames and the fitting of fluorescent lighting . Passing to WYPTE they were withdrawn between 1974 and 1976 – with one exception. 43 (then as 3043) survived into the late 1970’s when it was taken out of service and parked up in the Skircoat Road bodyshop, where spasmodically over a lengthy period it was extensively rebuilt, emerging fully repainted in the latest PTE livery and re-entering service. By this time the ranks of halfcabs were rapidly diminishing, and 43 soon became the last one in service in Halifax, being finally withdrawn in 1980. Because of its condition it was a choice candidate for preservation, and at the present time it is once again being restored by its owner – former Halifax enthusiast but now Devon-based Richard McAllister.

252 (RJX 252) Albion Nimbus NS3AN / Weymann B31F, new in 1963.

Many of Halifax JOC’s routes ran out of town along busy main road corridors for a few miles, then climbed out of the valleys to to serve hilltop villages before meandering along narrow, tortuous country lanes to their eventual destination in the back of beyond, usually on the edge of bleak moors. Because of the nature of the outer ends of these routes, single deckers often had to be used, but with no limited stop conditions these could easily become overloaded on the busier sections. Manager Le Fevre sought to operate the main corridors with double deckers which would then connect with feeder services to the outer districts provided by a small fleet of nimble, small capacity single deckers. Accordingly after trying out a demonstrator, ten Albion Nimbuses (250-259, RJX 251-259) were purchased, entering service in the summer of 1963. They featured an Albion-built engine which was effectively a four-cylinder version of the Leyland 0375 used in the Tiger Cub, an Albion-designed gearbox and BMC axles. Neat looking bodywork was provided by Weymann, similar in style to recent ones by Harrington for Western Welsh, but having the large, protruding Halifax type destination box, and curved windscreens – the first in the fleet. The windows were quite large and the interior was finished in a cream formica with green vynide-covered seats, giving a very light and airy feel inside.

252 is pictured descending Upper Bolton Brow towards Sowerby Bridge on its way to Mill Bank. The cottages to the right have long since been pulled down, and in the upper left background the Willow Hall Mills complex later followed suit being replaced by a new housing development.

Geoff Hilditch had already suffered unpleasant experiences with Nimbuses whilst GM at Great Yarmouth, and was glad to leave them behind when he took up the equivalent post at Halifax in 1963. One can imagine his horror on arriving here to find that his predecessor had bequeathed him a fleet of ten new ones ! The feeder service idea never materialised and the unfortunate little buses were simply put out onto the existing routes, often having to carry heavy loads on the busy sections. As often happens when major operators take on lightweight buses, they were not treated sympathetically. The engineers maintained them like heavyweights, the frustrated drivers drove (and abused) them like heavyweights and the depot staff and traffic department frequently allowed them to be allocated to inappropriate routes where they got a ‘hammering’. Mechanical problems and deficiencies quickly arose and they were almost totally unloved. Two (250/251) had their seats recovered in moquette and fitted with headrests, and were repainted into the recently introduced DP livery with the green and cream areas reversed. Eventually the Nimbuses often found a niche operating schools’ swimming baths contracts where their 31-seat capacity was just right for the typical class size, and driven sympathetically by the more senior drivers they didn’t venture far from home.

251 (RJX 251) Albion Nimbus NS3AN / Weymann B31F new in 1963.

Hilditch quickly opted to rid himself of the Nimbuses whilst they were still fairly new and saleable, and they were all withdrawn and sold between 1965 and 1967. All found ready buyers, and as happened later with some of the Regent V’s, most of the Nimbuses were repainted for their new owners by the department’s paintshop. 250 passed to the small independent E. & T. Harvey of Mousehole in Cornwall, where it was found to be ideal for negotiating the village’s narrow streets. It ran successfully there for many more years before being purchased by a Lincolnshire-based preservationist and restored to its dual-purpose livery once more. 255 remained in the town for a few more years having passed to the Corporation’s Welfare Department, replacing an ex-Bristol Omnibus Bristol K-type that had been cut down into a single decker. With a large section of its nearside cut away, a nearside wheelchair lift was installed and the previous orange lower panels were repainted in a perculiar salmon pink shade.
Here 251, minus its seat headrests, stands in Elmwood Garage awaiting collection by its new owner Booth & Fisher of Halfway, near Sheffield. Booth & Fisher ran a number of Nimbuses, this one later having to have its tall destination box cut down due to clearance problems under a very low bridge. It even lasted long enough to pass with the company to the South Yorkshire PTE, not being withdrawn until 1978.

53 (TCP 53) Leyland Titan PD3/4 / Weymann H40/32F, new in 1963. (Photo – John Stringer)

In 1963 it was the turn of the Corporation fleet to receive some PD3’s and these eight (51-58, TCP 51-58) had bodywork by Weymann which was like a lengthened version of the previous year’s PD2s, but with lower panels that were slightly deeper and a windscreen that was recessed towards the top edge. The interiors still featured brown vynide seating but for some obscure reason the window surrounds on 54 were finished in a vivid green colour. All passed to WYPTE and all were withdrawn and scrapped in 1976.
53 is pictured in Northowram Village, having passed the earlier terminus at the end of Towngate (in the background, where the cars are parked) and heading down The Hough a further further few hundred yards to the later terminus at Stephen Close.

All photographs by Roger Cox unless otherwise stated.

Text by John Stringer.

Part Three, click here

Halifax Passenger Transport in the Mid-1960’s – Part One

In late 1964 following a spell with London Transport, southern-born Roger Cox took up the position of Traffic Clerk with Halifax Passenger Transport – the combined name for the Halifax Corporation and Halifax Joint Omnibus Committee operations – and spent two years there before returning south to progress his career in the industry. A permanent situation of staff shortages meant that all ‘inside’ staff were encouraged to work ‘on the road’ for overtime and so Roger would soon have a more direct involvement with the actual vehicles, routes and local topography than perhaps he would have originally bargained for. There follows a selection of Roger’s photographs – with a few additions to fill any gaps – illustrating the vehicles he encountered during his stay in the town.

At the outbreak of the Second World War Halifax Corporation & JOC had been expecting to take delivery of further AEC Regents, but in the event only one had materialised. No utility types were purchased at all during the war and the existing fleet had to soldier on – including many early 1930’s AEC’s which would otherwise have been withdrawn. By the end of the war a high proportion the fleet was well past its best and in urgent need of replacement. The Department placed orders for 90 Regent III double deck chassis with the 9.6 litre engine and preselector gearbox, and 24 of the equivalent Regal III single deck chassis for delivery in batches throughout the rest of the decade. 74 of the Regents were to be bodied by Park Royal, the remaining 16 by Roe. Also, following the loan of the demonstrator prototype, there were also to be nine of the newly introduced Leyland PD2 chassis fitted with Leyland’s own design of bodywork.

105 (ACP 389) Leyland Titan PD2/1 / Leyland H33/26R new in 1947. (Photo – John Stringer)

The nine Leyland Titan PD2/1’s with Leyland’s own H30/26R bodywork looked oddly out of place in a fleet which had been predominantly AEC since 1930. Most of the Regents and Regals from the mid-thirties had been equipped with preselector gearboxes – though a few of the later deliveries had reverted to the crash variety – but all the early postwar AEC deliveries were to be of the latest air-operated preselector type. With no such gearbox available from Leyland at the time, the PD2’s had manual gearboxes with a crash first gear, but the new-fangled synchromesh on 2nd, 3rd and 4th. Seven were delivered in as intended in 1947, but the last two were delayed until 1948 – arriving with a modified heating system which resulted in a slight difference to the shape of the panel under the front nearside canopy. Once on the go they were very good performers on the local hills, and were very characterful in the sound effects department, with the typical period Leyland combination of rhythmic, hunting tickover and asthmatic wheezing and whistling sounds from the pneumatic governor. Another feature seemingly unique to this type of body was the pair of heater dishes at the top of the lower saloon front bulkhead, which were made up of concentric copper discs. After the renumbering of the Corporation fleet in 1954 they had become 100-108 (ACP 384-392). Eight had been delivered with chrome-plated radiator shells, but one featured an orange painted shell, giving it a distinctive appearance – this being switched over the years from one PD2 to another, but spending most of its time on 101. 100 had been converted to Training Bus 411 as early as 1959, but been withdrawn in 1963. 107 had been involved in a low bridge accident in 1963, after which the conversion to open-top was completed officially and it became Training Bus and Tree Lopper 418 to replace 411. By 1968 it had been converted into mock-up of an 1898 tramcar for use in the forthcoming 70th Anniversary parade. In 1965 108 was been briefly transferred to the JOC as 308, but it and the others were withdrawn in 1965/66, four passing to Oldham Corporation to assist with a shortage there and lasting until 1969.
105 is pictured in Great Albion Street passing the town’s original Crossfield Bus Station (opened in 1954) with the Odeon Cinema in the background. The Bus Station closed, and services transferred to the current Winding Road Bus Station in 1989.

215 (ACP 629) AEC Regent III 9612E / Roe H31/25R, new in 1948.
(Photo – Charles H. Roe, John Stringer Collection)

Delivery dates for AEC chassis were a problem though since the company had a full order book and was heavily committed to turning out the RT variant for London Transport. Park Royal had set up a special factory to build bodies for the RT but was having difficulty getting them into production, and in the end RT chassis were piling up everywhere and causing a problem. The decision was taken to offer some of these chassis to provincial operators, and as a result Halifax were offered eight in place of half of the sixteen standard models intended for bodying by Roe, which was gladly accepted in order to obtain an earlier delivery. Despite the superiority of their teak-framed bodies, surprisingly withdrawal of both versions commenced as early as 1958, and all were gone by 1963, except for conventional Regent 215 (ACP 629) which had become Training Bus 412 in 1959, lasting until 1966. A further pair of similar vehicles (73/74, BCP 536/537) – replacing a cancelled order for two Regals no longer required – was delivered in 1949, having subtle differences to the earlier ones such as slightly more rounded window corners and a one-piece rear emergency window instead of the previous two. This pair lasted until 1966.
In the absence of a useable 1960’s period photo of any of these, here is the official Roe view of what was to become Training Bus 412, prior to delivery in 1948 as 215 – complete with the impressive JOC transfers and gold-shaded fleet numbers, and the additional black lining to the upper saloon waistrail band which was discontinued in the early 1950’s.

373 (BCP 667), AEC Regent III 9612E / Park Royal H33/26R new 1950 as 273.

Though Park Royal offered an excellent steel-framed body, in order to keep costs down a timber-framed composite version was specified. This was largely based on their wartime utility design with the more curved frontal profile of the metal version, but with a rear end that owed more to prewar practice. Though a price had been quoted by Park Royal for these bodies it was subject to a ‘rise and fall’ clause – and rise it did ! Before long the figure had increased considerably, so in order to keep to something near the original quote economies had to be made. Hence metal window pans were dispensed with and the glasses mounted directly into the now exposed, spindly wooden frames, being retained by wood fillets as one would with a garden shed ! This was to be their downfall, and deterioration set in rapidly, necessitating remedial strengthening after only a few years, and continual problems therafter. Sixteen of them (235-250) for the JOC fleet were built to eight feet width, taking advantage of the limited relaxation in the use of such vehicles on routes approved by the Traffic Commissioners – in Halifax’s case these were those to Brighouse, Hebden Bridge, Huddersfield and Queensbury.
By the mid-1960’s all of the earlier ones had gone, and just three of the eight-footers (originally 246-248, but by then 346-348, AJX 372-374) survived until 1965, along with the final 1950 batch (originally 270-283, now 370-383, BCP 664-677). Despite the fragility of their bodywork they were otherwise good, if creeky, performers and ideally suited to intensive stop-start work in the mountainous local terrain.
Here 373 rests in Elmwood Garage – the premises across the road from the Department’s Skircoat Road Garage – opened in 1932 to specifically house the JOC fleet.

373 (BCP 667)

Another view of 373 returning from the appropriately named Steep Lane – out on the edge of the moors beyond the hilltop village of Sowerby. Having just passed through King Cross in the background, it is at the point where King Cross Road becomes King Cross Street for the last descent into town. It had not much longer to serve, being withdrawn and sold for scrap in 1966.

277 (BCP 671) AEC Regent III 9612E / Park Royal H33/26R new 1950 as 277.

The rest were withdrawn and scrapped during 1966/67, but 377 was given a reprieve and fared rather better. The Transport Department was due to reach its 75th Anniversary in 1973, but General Manager Geoff Hilditch, anticipating that changes were afoot and fearing that it might not last until then, decided instead to celebrate the 70th Anniversary in 1968. Arrangements were made with the local Charity Gala committee that their annual parade through the town should be substantially augmented with an impressive display of vintage transport. To that end he retained 377 and had it repainted, renumbered back to the original 277 using original gold shaded transfers, and had the last two remaining earlier-style JOC transfers applied featuring the LMS and LNER railway devices either side of the Corporation’s coat-of-arms. Local enthusiasts had expected that the Department would then retain 277 in preservation, but Hilditch had no such intention and soon afterwards it was sold to Tony Blackman who at the present time has not only owned it for 47 years, but refurbished it yet again and returned it for occasional operation in service both with his former Halifax Joint Committee local service venture, and nowadays with his Yorkshire Heritage Buses private hire operation. Here it is seen shortly after repainting as 277, having passed Skircoat Garage (note the adjoining Manager’s house) and turning towards Elmwood Garage.

258 (BCP 544) AEC Regal III 9621E / Roe B33F, new as 269 in 1949

There were 24 of these bonny Roe-bodied Regal III’s ordered for delivery – five for the Corporation fleet and 19 for the JOC. In the event before their construction commenced two of the Corporation ones were deemed to be no longer required and they were cancelled and replaced by a pair of additional Regent III’s with Roe bodies.
Following the successful operation of one-man-operated, full-sized single deckers in neighbouring Huddersfield and consequent changes in legislation, Halifax JOC had introduced a limited OMO operation on the Hebden Bridge-Cragg Vale or Hardcastle Crags, and Elland-Sowerby Bridge-Triangle services during 1953, and around the same time was reintroducing local Countryside Tours during the public holiday periods. Consequently they rebuilt 14 of the Regals to B33F layout for this purpose, and repainted them in a special livery of cream with a single orange band. Two of the Corporation Regals were withdrawn as early as 1958 and passed to McConnachie’s of Campbelltown out on the Mull of Kintyre. The third survived as a spare – used often as a staff bus – until 1962, the unrebuilt JOC ones also going at the same time. The cream and orange-liveried converted ones in the meantime had reverted back to standard livery, and withdrawal came in 1963/64 – except for the one pictured which after a few months in the Corporation fleet as 99, returned to the JOC as 268 (269 having by then been used for a new Leopard), soon becoming 258 in order to allow for another new Leopard (268). A great favourite with local enthusiasts – almost regarded as a mascot – it finally passed for use by a local builder for staff transport in 1966, being scrapped by 1970. Here it is awaiting its next spell of duty parked in Bay 7 at Skircoat Garage.

80 (CCP 612) AEC Regent III 9613E / Park Royal H30/26R new as 360 in 1951.

Six more Park Royal-bodied Regent III’s entered the fleet in 1951, but these were different beasts altogether from the previous examples. Part of a later order placed by GM Freddie Cook, along with another for six rather exotic and sadly problematic Daimler CD650’s with East Lancashire bodies which had gone by 1962. The Regents were to the revised dimensions of 27 feet by eight feet wide and their bodywork was to Park Royal’s latest four-bay, metal-framed design, introduced at the 1950 Commercial Motor Show on an example for Morecambe & Heysham. The styling was closely inspired by that of the London RT, though in reality was very different under the skin. They were considerably heavier than their predecessors, weighing in at well over eight tons, and though extremely soundly constructed there was some reduction in performance – especially in their ability to move off up hills. These coincided with AEC’s redesign of the exhaust system which resulted in them having a characteristic, raucous growl – 80 being acknowledged as the growliest ! Withdrawn in 1966, all six passed to Green Bus Service of Rugeley, and were scrapped in 1970.
Here 80 is pictured still looking in fine fettle not long before its withdrawal, growling up Gibbet Street from the Town Centre on the local route 13 to Highroad Well, following the original tram route of 1898, though it would terminate a couple of hundred yards beyond the old tram terminus by performing an awkward reverse into a narrow lane by the Brown Cow Inn. By this time the Highroad Well service was linked across town to the Mixenden circular routes 11 to 14.

90 (DCP 834) Daimler CVG6 / Roe H33/28R, new in 1954. (Photo – John Stringer)

Following the tragic sudden death at an early age of Manager Freddie Cooke, Scot Roddy MacKenzie took the helm and chose to purchase Daimlers. The Corporation received twelve CVG6’s (87-98, DCP 831-842) fitted with fully teak-framed Roe bodies. With these, MacKenzie introduced a revised and simplified version of the livery more in the style of contemporary Glasgow buses, and also the ‘Scottish’ style of destination box aperture. The new livery was generally unpopular – especially when applied to older vehicles and as soon as MacKenzie departed during 1956 – but before his replacement arrived – the Assistant Engineer conspired with the paintshop foreman to have them all repainted quickly back into the traditional style ! Another feature introduced with these was a brighter interior, with a lighter and more modern fawn and green seating moquette in the lower saloon, and the interior woodwork having a varnished light oak finish. The latter proved popular and was quickly applied to the majority of the existing postwar vehicles by means of scumbling, whereby the existing dark woodwork was repainted in a white basecoat, then a coloured varnish-like substance was applied to which an imitation woodgrain effect was skilfully added with a special tool. In fact there was quite an enthusiastic frenzy of light oak scumbling, it being applied to much of the office interiors and furniture. Even in the early 2000’s the writer had the use of an old metal filing cabinet in the Training School still finished in that way ! Weighing not far short of eight tons these buses were quickly found to be seriously underpowered with their Gardner 6LW engines, and with the arrival of new manager Dick Le Fevre and his Leyland-buying policy it was decided to re-engine them with Leyland O600’s. This gave them a moderate boost, not to mention some very unusual sound effects – gone was the monotonous Gardner throb, replaced by a rather subdued huskyness. In 1961 93 was fitted with a supercharged Daimler CD6 engine, producing an even more unusual sound effect, and in 1964 95 was treated to a mighty Gardner 6LX – resulting in a most impressive performance. Daimler-engined 93 was the first to go in 1968, the rest following in 1970/71.

Here 90 returns along Orange Street on the short local service 17 from Ovenden Way, still showing the outbound destination. Behind is the former Brunswick Bowling Alley – opened by ‘Coronation Street’ actress Pat Phoenix in 1964, but closed in 1969 after which it became a Presto (later Netto) supermarket. Demolished in 2009 the site has recently been redeveloped as a leisure and restaurant complex.

292 (DCP 845) Daimler CVG6 / Metro-Cammell H33/26R, new as 286 in 1954

The JOC received ten CVG6’s (284-293, DCP 843-852), but unlike the Roe-bodied ones for the Corporation these featured Metro-Cammell (MCCW) bodies. These were of the Orion lightweight, metal-framed design introduced in 1952, but despite being more than half a ton lighter than their heavyweight Roe-bodied counterparts in the Corporation fleet, they were quoted at the time as being ‘a more substantial version’ of the super lightweight Orion then popular. 287 received an experimental supercharged Gardner 6LW for a while in 1958, but otherwise they retained the Gardner engines through out their lives. Renumbered 390-399 in 1962, they became (confusingly) 290-299 in 1964. Withdrawal took place in 1967/68, four passing to Derby Corporation and lasting until 1969. Here 292 is parked in the corner of Elmwood Garage alongside Regent III 375.

291 (DCP 844) Daimler CVG6 / Metro-Cammell H33/26R, new as 285 in 1954

Another of the ‘Met-Cams’ is pictured here returning from the Ovenden area passing through the extensive Dean Clough Mills complex of carpet manufacturer John Crossley & Sons – by far Halifax’s largest employer of people within the town. It is ascending Corporation Street where it would within a few seconds pass the former Seedlings Mount Brewery of Richard Whittaker & Son – famous for its ‘Cock O’the North’ and ‘Shire’ Ales – before entering the town centre. The destination ‘6 West End’ is inappropriate here, it being likely that the bus is returning ‘private’ from somewhere and the crew have already set the destination for the next journey. Shortly after Le Fevre replaced MacKenzie as GM in 1956, this particular vehicle – then 285 – was briefly turned out in an experimental ‘upside down’ livery with the areas of orange and green reversed. This did not meet the Committee’s or the general public’s approval and it quickly reverted to normal.

290 (DCP 843) Daimler CVG6 / Metro-Cammell H33/26R, new as 284 in 1954

Another of the ‘Met Cams’, passes through King Cross on its way to Tuel Lane, which is just beyond the Halifax boundary in the steeply graded upper reaches of Sowerby Bridge. Immediately after passing the cameraman the road forks – the left fork down into the Calder Valley bottom at Sowerby Bridge, the right a more level road along the side of the valley towards Hebden Bridge and Todmorden. 290 would take the left fork, but just beyond the borough boundary half way down the valley side would take a severe right turn along Park Road and Beech Road thorough the steeply graded streets of densely packed terraced houses to the north of Sowerby Bridge, then climb the upper section of the incredibly steep Tuel Lane, terminating in a back street near the top. This would be a particular challenge for a 6LW-engined Daimler, which did not quite have sufficient power for such terrain.

117 (GJX 329) Daimler CVG6 / Roe H37/28R, new as 17 in 1956.

The last vehicles ordered by Roddy MacKenzie before he moved on was for a further five Daimler CVG6’s with Roe bodies for the Corporation fleet. Delivered shortly after Dick Le Fevre took over, and replacing the last of the prewar Regents, they featured the latest version of the Roe body, having a traditional teak-framed lower deck with an alloy-framed upper deck and weighing around six hundredweights less than their previous all-teak predecessors. The destination layout was revised to something similar to the ‘pre-MacKenzie’ deliveries, and they were in traditional livery. Delivered as 15-19 (GJX 327-331) they were soon renumbered 115-119. In 1971 they were transferred to the JOC to replace the short-lived and much later Dennis Lolines, and even taking their numbers as 300-304. 300 & 301 were withdrawn in 1972, but the others lasted a little longer to be renumbered yet again as 382-384 to make way for new Fleetlines. 382 & 383 departed in 1973, but 384 survived long enough to pass to to the West Yorkshire PTE in 1974, theoretically becoming their 3384, though it never carried that number. Soon afterwards it passed into preservation and was eventually recertified for PSV use, and is to be seen regularly at local rallies. Here it is seen parked on the steam-clean ramp behind Skircoat Garage, carrying what was then a recent innovation – advertising.

117 (GJX 329)

117 again on what must have been a hazy but warm summer’s day judging by the wide open windscreen, turning left out of Hall Street on the fringe of the town centre into Gibbet Street heading for Highroad Well on the cross-town route 12 from Mixenden – closely followed by a Lambretta motor scooter. In the background, north of the town centre, is the mass of Beacon Hill which provides a towering backdrop to the town, with the prominent but isolated Beacon House on the top.

All photographs by Roger Cox unless otherwise stated.

Text by John Stringer.

Part Two, click here

Shearings Coaches

Following on from my previous W Pyne & Son Starbeck article.

My Father joined Shearings in Easter 1965 covering the Bournemouth tour and driving a new Bedford VAL. This coach was one of 20 purchased from Plaxtons Scarborough, I did have a photo of all these coaches lined up on Marine Drive but unfortunately I Have misplaced it. His Bedford Val was fitted with a Leyland O.400 diesel engine reason being Bedfords own 466 was still being developed and not yet in production. The small front twin steer 16 inch wheels proved to be very popular with passengers giving such a smooth comfortable ride. The Val design was a credit to Bedford design team as was the later YRT chassis fitted with a centrally mounted horizontal 466 later 500 Turbo engine. One is bound to wonder that should these brilliant designers being given a free hand with good backing financial support to develop a robust chassis to compete with foreign manufactures such as Volvo, Daf Mercedes, Scania,Etc, Bedford could still be in business! So sad!!
Malcolm Wray son of Andrew Wray based at Dacre Banks rejoined the business and was fortunate that Deregulation of the bus industry allowed small operators such as Longsters of Pateley, Simpsons and Clarks of Ripon, Murgatroyds and Burtons of Fellbeck, Beecrofts of Fewston and Dodsworths of Minskip all benefited by advertising their own tours either at home or continental.
Malcolm was very lucky in that James Herriott (Alf White) the vet wrote some best selling books mainly about his experience visiting farms in the beautiful Yorkshire Dales when he decided to advertise the James Herriot tour. It was an immediate success, he gave the commentary while his fellow Director did the driving there was such a tremendous demand, coaches running to capacity and after having to buy second hand coaches and being dependent on West Yorkshire and Wallace Arnold for seasonal work he was able to purchase top spec coaches from Plaxtons and Duple for the Ford R series and Volvo B10 m s( photo attached). The fleet was kept busy with local and continental tours. Volvos especially,, were very popular totally reliable capable of constant high speed motorway, fitted with air suspension, double glazing, tv toilet, etc.
Malcolm and his brother in law were both very shrewd business men and having taken over Pynes they kept the bottom garage and the Low Harrogate booking office.
They had for many years covered numerous school contracts collecting children from up the Dales and delivering them safely to various schools in the Harrogate area. This could be quite a challenge dependant on the weather especially in winter, nevertheless guaranteed them a regular income. Around the mid 1950 s the government relaxed the speed limit applicable to HGV s increasing this from 20 Mph to presumably 30 MPH,, and up till then general hauliers did everything in their power to keep lorries under the 3 ton U/W, to the extent of specifying different tyres, removing passenger seats, tools etc. Any vehicle exceeding the 3 ton limit had to display a 20 MPH sign approx. 6inch in Dia in Black. Nowadays drivers would find it so unbelievable to see large HGV s trundling along at 20 MPH!
Another point of interest was the opening of the first motorway designated the M6 in the Preston by pass. area in 5/ 12/ 1958, the designer Mr Lord soon suffered some bad press reports as it soon became evident that this motorway soon began to break up. This was unfair as no one could ever had anticipated heavy lorries travelling at speed some of which had badly designed axle loading thus creating more stress on the road surface. Hauliers soon had to face another problem, ie vehicles constantly suffering engine and transmission failures advising drivers to avoid using the Motorway whenever possible. This proved to be the decline of our heavy vehicle manufactures , Atkinson.Seddon, Leyland, Foden, ERF. Guy, AEC, etc fell by the roadside simply because our manufacturers had never had the experience of operating on the continental autobahn.
Drivers quickly persuaded management to invest in the popular HGVs.Vo Mercedes, Scania. Daf s, etc s all fitted with comfortable Sleeper cabs, night heaters, sound proofing etc.
If I may stand corrected re the article about Bob Pantry and his son Jeff having had a garage at Dacre Banks this is not so. Bob a real gentleman was employed by Wrays Coaches as their fitter. Prior to that he had worked in a similar capacity for Yorks Electricity board. He had also worked at Pynes and finally started his own business on Camwal Road Starbeck. Sadly he passed away some years ago leaving Jeff to carry on the business. Strangely his garage is almost opposite Pynes bus garage which is now owned by a local brewery. Having lost contact with Jeff I finally met up with him recently and was saddened to hear Jeff had reluctantly had to part with his and Bobs pride and joy a single deck Bristol ex Lincoln corporation. They had spent many hours restoring this bus but lack of storage unfortunately meant it had to go. However Jeff had also owned a( possibly) 29 seater Bedford coach painted in Pynes colours.Jeff kindly gave me a photo of Greengrass(from Heartbeat fame) reputably showing him driving this Bedford. Unfortunately this Bedford had also to go! Having met Jeff it suddenly struck me while listening to his experiences he would also have such a great story to tell and I hope he will consider sitting down and recording his for the benefit of all us enthusiasts.
I have my Son Ian to thank for drawing my attention to Pynes, I’m so thankful he did so. Had he not done so it is quite possible all the photos (which can be seen at this link) and details would have maybe never come to light!
Also I have been so very proud of my Father, he always enjoyed his career travelling along many roads bringing pleasure to countless clients, driving safely and been trusted with handling some top quality coaches.

Keith Todd
08/2014

Bristol RE

As a graduate engineer I found myself training at the Brislington works of Bristol (Commercial Vehicles Ltd) when the RE was about to be constructed – in fact I was on the production line when the first production model was assembled – I took in my Bus and Coach magazine with an exploded sketch of the layout to help us put it together! As an aside, the same vehicle eventually became an experimental vehicle and I had the pleasure of driving the only RELH6B – a turbocharged horizontal version of the Bristol BVW engine!
It is interesting that Bristol did not extend the MW, like AEC and Leyland extended their Reliance and Leopard models to meet the new 36 ft maximum permitted length. Cyril Eyles was the down to earth engineer who dreamed up the layout of the RE I believe. The glories were that the engine came closer to the back axle than the Panther and Swift et al and drove forward with a smaller diameter higher speed prop shaft over the dropped centre rear axle into the gearbox – originally the synchromesh box designed specifically from scratch with input and output flanges at the same (back) side. The drive from the gearbox went straight into the standard Lodekka rear axle – a well proven unit at the time (and only came to grief on the VRLH6L coach version with the Leyland 680 Power Plus engine). This provided a better, even optimal, weight distribution between axles to provide better ride, steering and braking performance.

Clutch life became an early problem related to drivers not able to hear the engine and the higher torque of the 6HLX engine. Later calculations proved it to be of too small a diameter. We discovered that Leyland and AEC were having similar problems with 36ft long vehicles. While various modifications were tried, the change to semi-automatic using the SCG epicyclic box with BCV transfer gear to bring the output to the rear was put in hand.
The earliest vehicles had a rear suspension with rigid beams pivoted at the front each with two air bags, one in front and one behind the rear axle. This beam failed in service and the experimental department confirmed the mode of failure on a 24hr running test rig. The decision was taken fairly swiftly to replace this arrangement with something that had worked well – the Flat Floor Lodekka (FS – FLF) arrangement of ‘flexible beams’ with single airbags behind the rear axle. It was my job to produce the Service Modification drawing to campaign change the rear suspension!

With regard to the engines – I was with Eastern Counties as a junior engineer when the incoming General Manager wanted to be seen to have fast coaches, so he had one vehicle (ECOC RE890?) converted to horizontal Leyland 680. BCV also introduced it as an option and certainly Crosville went for it because there REs were being overtaken by Ribble Leylands on the M1. However they soon found that if two REs one with Gardner and one with Leyland engines left London at the same time, the Gardner was home first.

When I was at Ribble, I eventually got Leyland to admit that the reason that the longer Leopards faded on Motorway hills, whereas the double deck VRL also with a 680 engine could go ’70MPH uphill’, was the unwillingness of Leyland to produce a ‘Power Plus’ version of the horizontal engine because the exhaust manifolds would get in the way of the chassis frame. Signs of Leyland’s fall from excellence!

Geoff Pullin
12/2014

21/12/14 – 10:59

I seem to remember during the sixties Buses Illustrated ran a “joke” article called “Ready, steady, bus”, which tried to bring our hobby up to date with a bus news bulletin presented in the style of contemporary pop music programmes. It referred to “Bristol’s new smash hit, ‘MWL'”
At the time I wondered if that was just a figment of the writer’s imagination, or had Bristol offered the MW in 36ft length, but not sold any. This article answers the question! I think the Lodekka was actually offered as a chassis to be bodied by non-standard builders in it’s final years after the partial takeover by Leyland, but again none were sold.

Don McKeown


22/12/14 – 07:36

I have looked through the linked article related to the exchange of VRT for FLF between SBG and NBC.
It suggests that it was the Tilling operators who wanted the transverse engine layout. I think you will find that the change of engine position was brought about by legislation that provided grants to bus operators for introducing vehicles suitable for one man [sic] operation and I understood that the small print stated transverse rear engine for double decks. I would appreciate any ‘inside’ information on the reason for the rapid design change from the reasonably well developed longitudinal engined VRL to the VRT.

Geoff Pullin


22/12/14 – 12:08

From the point if view of drivers and passengers alike I always found the RE to be the very best of the first generation rear engined single deckers. For the driver it was well behaved, smooth and free of any nasty vices. The virtually universal, but not exclusively so, smart looking ECW body was simple and uncluttered within and the model was the outright winner in its class for me. As a luxury coach the RE was equally delightful and well behaved. Having driven and ridden in many other brutes of the period, of famous makes, I feel free of any guilt in this enthusiasm.

Chris Youhill


23/12/14 – 05:20

A couple of observations. Firstly, the arrangement of the RE engine and gearbox was apparently selected because BCV wanted to offer a short version, and the Gardner engines were relatively long, so that the rear overhang would have been too long if the gearbox was between the engine and the rear axle.
Regarding the change from the VRL design to the VRT, I suspect that there is some truth in both of the reasons given. The early bus grant specs did only refer to transverse engined double deckers (allegedly, the specs were drawn up by people from Leyland). However, there was another issue – or, in effect, the same issue as that which prompted the arrangement of the mechanical components of the RE. With the engine mounted longitudinally, and the gearbox, the rear overhang was so long that the total vehicle length could not have been less than about 32’7″. At that time the Construction and Use regulations specified the proportion of the length that could be outside the wheelbase. Positioning the gearbox ahead of the rear axle in the manner of the RE would not have been possible with a double decker. Thus the vehicles would have been large enough to have about 80 seats, but at that time they would principally have been used to replace early LDs, none of which seated more than 60. Everything else aside, the extra fuel used would have done nothing for the Tilling Group’s operating costs per mile, and, it is known that General Managers were “incentivised” to try to reduce operating pcm each year, even if only by a fraction of a penny. So it is perhaps understandable that Tilling managers wanted a shorter model. In practice, very few 33′ double deckers were delivered to THC/BET/SBG/NBC companies.
There is another aspect to the story that is also rather curious. BCV wanted to return to a single type of “universal” chassis, harking back to the days of the K and L types, and the VRL would theoretically have achieved this. Production economies would have been the benefit. So it seems rather strange that, when BCV offered the VRL as a single decker, the prices quoted were higher than for an equivalent RE.

Nigel Frampton


07/01/15 – 06:36

What a fascinating article Geoff. I’m quite envious of you training with Bristol Commercial Vehicles, and on the early REs too, at what must have been an exciting time in the industry. The RELH with the turbocharged horizontal Bristol BVW (BHW) engine you mention was actually the third of three prototypes built -this one being chassis number REX.003. After several years serving as a BCV testbed vehicle, it was eventually kitted out by ECW to full coach specification (C47F), and entered service with West Yorkshire as its CRG1 (OWT241E) with Gardner 6HLX engine in 1967. It has always been my favourite RELH coach, and was the only one of WY’s CRGs to have a manual gearbox. Conversely, WY’s earlier ‘express’ RELH6Gs (ERG1-11) all had manual ‘boxes apart from ERG7, which was converted to semi-automatic transmission. From new in 1966, this coach was dogged by an annoying vibration at speed. Various remedies were tried – new flywheel, gearbox, rear axle – but to no avail. In the end someone suggested fitting a fluid transmission, and the vibration magically vanished. Presumably something must have been misaligned somewhere in the original configuration, but the new fluid flywheel and epicyclic gearbox did the trick.
West Yorkshire did have some problems with the manual gearbox RELLs, relating to the synchromesh balk rings failing from time to time. Despite encouragement from Bristol for drivers to use the synchromesh as intended and depress the clutch once for each gearchange, most drivers appeared happier using the tried and tested method of double declutching to effect better changes. This could be confirmed by the “FRRRP! FRRRP!” hiss of air emanating from the air assisted clutch – one “FRRRP!” for each depression of the clutch pedal.
Nigel’s comments relating to the Bristol VRL also ring true. The New Bus Grant double-decker specifications at the time did indeed only refer to transverse rear-engined models, and Leyland was involved in advising on this. A shorter VRL would have fallen foul of the Construction & Use Regulations as Nigel states, due to the rear overhang of a vehicle being determined as a proportion of the wheelbase. Therefore, the shorter the wheelbase, the shorter the rear overhang had to be to reduce disproportionate outswing at the rear. Some years later, this caused similar problems for Leyland, when designing the short National. The long wheelbase National had a long rear overhang due to the engine and gearbox being mounted behind the rear axle. The short wheelbase model had shorter window pans due to the body pillars being closer together. This spacing, together with alterations to the fan drive, allowed the rear overhang to be reduced and conform to C&U regulations. The engine compartment was more cramped on the SWB Nationals as a result, which made some engine maintenance tasks more difficult.

Now, going back to CRG1, just before Christmas I finally took delivery of a model of my beloved coach (by EFE) after waiting around 47 years for the privilege! It is a fine and beautiful model however, and has been well worth the wait.

Brendan Smith


13/01/15 – 11:41

The first 250 or so RE buses (not coaches) for Bristol Omnibus all had Leyland engines. Gardners began to come in during the 1972 delivery but there were only 14 Gardner-engined REs in all out of nearly 400 (including RESL). For coaches and DPs, the split was more even but Leylands still predominated.
I worked in the Traffic Department 1970-3 but the talk was that Gardner’s could not meet Bristol’s demand for large numbers of REs so a decision was made to standardise on Leyland engines. I also heard that the few Gardners were diverted from another NBC order. Someone may know more!

Geoff Kerr


21/10/15 – 07:09

With regard to Nigel’s final paragraph, when I was training at BCV (1962-5), the VR was only known as the ‘N’ type and the SU was the ‘P’ type – the latter only a glimmer in Cyril Eyles’ (CE) eye – and always referred to as likely to have a Perkins engine.
With regard to Geoff Kerr’s comments about BOC RE buses – I think you will find that the decision to go to single deck city buses was taken by a General Manager, hot from Ribble (where similar decision had been taken – also using REs!) The fairly new CE at BOC at the time (Philip Robinson) I think you will find started life as a Leyland senior apprentice and may well have had biassed views on engine provider. Even within NBC, personalities could be decisive! At Ribble, of course, Harry Tennant decided (in BET days!) the RELL6L drank too much fuel and specified Gardner for the second batch although shortage in NBC early days meant he had to accept RESL6L thereafter.

Geoff Pullin


22/10/15 – 07:21

The Gardner-engined REs that BOC received in 1972 were indeed diverted from another operator – Western National. There were also 3 Plaxton-bodied RELH coaches, diverted from the same source. I understand that WN had financial difficulties at the time.
I am slightly intrigued by Geoff Pullin’s reference to the SU as being known as the ‘P’ type. Duncan Roberts, in his book on the RE, mentions a proposed ‘P’ type, that would have been a lightweight rear-engined single decker (which, of course, never materialised). We can only speculate on what it would have been like. I had never heard of the SU being referred to by any other designation, and by 1962 it would have been in production for a year or two, so the use of an alternative designation seems a little odd.

Nigel Frampton


22/10/15 – 10:55

Perhaps time is playing tricks as indeed the SU was in production by 1962. Perhaps the P type was a successor for it – the Albion engine was not over popular then. I can’t remember it having a rear engine when I drew out a draft specification leaflet for the proposed new models that Chief Engineer Cyril Eyles intended. A quick flash of wisdom now tells me that the P type of course became the LH which did indeed have a Perkins engine and I think the Leyland engine was an option that nearly everyone took!

Geoff Pullin

Eastern Counties – selected memories May 1965 – December 1969

I was appointed Deputy Assistant Engineer to Eastern Counties Omnibus Company on May 17, 1965 at an annual salary of £1,000 after an interview at Fleet Street, London with the Tilling Senior Training Scheme directors followed by one at Norwich with General Manager Len Balls and Chief Engineer Leo Page. Unfortunately I became ill with an unknown virus immediately upon arrival and spent two weeks in hospital overlooking a cemetery and four weeks at home in Clevedon, Somerset recovering! I had a small office in the chief engineer’s office block on the first floor within the central repair works at Cremorne Lane, Norwich immediately behind the head office at 79 Thorpe Road, Norwich. The office looked out over Laurence Scott and Electromotors works and I was serenaded and showered by one of their large extraction plants.
I was worried that I would be expected to work out stresses and design things. I don’t think there was a job description! The only task I can recall as recurring was to take the minutes of the weekly works committee meeting chaired by Jack Robson, the Assistant Engineer – a true Yorkshire man, who I had come across by phone when at Bristol Commercial Vehicles Ltd (BCV) as a trainee. When I was having a spell in the service department at BCV, the phone rang one day and this Yorkshire voice said “You know that modified suspension beam that you have just fitted to our RE (coach), well it’s b***** broken again!” There were two main problems with the first batch of REs, one that the clutch plate life was very low and that the rear suspension hinged fabricated beams, which each supported two air bags, cracked in half spectacularly. The first was only cured by introducing fluid clutch and epi-cyclic gearboxes in time and the second was a campaign change to fit the FLF style flexible beam rear suspension to all REs. I was in BCV experimental department when the test rig confirmed the failure mode and in the drawing office to produce the campaign change drawing and instructions! Jack also introduced me to the phrase ‘as noisy as a weaving shed’ which meant nothing to me as a quiet west country man!
I had a few trips out with Jack, who tended to see the central repair works as his main domain. When I was training at Bristol Omnibus Company, I was shown the Setright ticket machine shop and made aware in hushed tones of a ‘problem’ that had been discovered whereby the machine could be made to print a ticket at the correct value and then the dials could be forced back to a lower fare and the register counters would only count the lower fare. Thus a conductor could provide the correct ticket to the customer and pay-in a lot less than was rightly due. One morning, travelling across Norwich to work on a full 1948 vintage K5G, (this body type had been replaced on my Bristol school journey eight years earlier!), I was at the back upstairs, showed my leather bound red pass and then watched the conductor ‘turn-back’ his Setright on every fare! I’m not sure whether Jack knew about this scam, but he soon had the senior Setright mechanic to discuss the matter! Another of his phrases comes to mind: ‘there’s none so miserable as those that are short or crippled’. We sallied forth to the Setright works in London and came back with a modification that should cure the old single digit fare machines still in use in Norwich city. We also took a two digit, modern machine, which I could turn back successfully and they promised to overhaul it and make it fraud proof. I was taken along to collect it, as the expert! I thought the machine felt ‘dodgy’ and succeeded in turning it back in front of the Setright managers! More Yorkshire expressions were forthcoming! Eventually they came up with a shear pin that broke if you tried too hard and then the conductor had to explain why his dial went round and round. I doubt if he got away at the first enquiry, but he certainly wouldn’t the second time. I don’t think the road staff could have known that it was me who upset their well paying scam – they never showed it! Far less difficult was the conversion of the Setright machines from £.s.d to £.p, which I planned.
I set up an experimental items system for trying things out in service and providing regular reports for the company and manufacturers (especially BCV and ECW) and this was always admired when I attended the Tilling Group regional engineering meetings three times a year, hence getting to know the chief engineers of the then Eastern Region. I had a rubber stamp made with the then-current oval Eastern Counties logo and the address so that all drawings and documents looked really professional.
The vehicle maintenance system comprised of ‘docks’ at fixed mileage which were scheduled from the Chief Engineers’ office weekly and were carried out at central repair works for the Norwich (Surrey Street), Cromer, Great Yarmouth, Lowestoft; Ipswich for Ipswich, Bury St Edmunds, Felixstowe and Saxmundham; Peterborough for Peterborough, March and Kings Lynn and Cambridge (Newmarket Road) for Cambridge (Hills Road), Ely and Newmarket. Specific mechanical units (engines, gearbox, rear axle / differential, air brake units, air suspension control valves, compressors) were scheduled for preventative change and were sent out by truck from central repair works in time for fitment.
When I arrived, the schedules showed vehicles due for attention every 30,000 miles and with the sixth dock being a change of all units, then the cycle started again. The previous chief engineer John Woods had set up this system and it had worked like clockwork. A few years before my arrival he had sent news to all depots that through the completion of the programme to replace all 6 cylinder engines in double decks with 5 cylinder engines, the company’s overall average fuel consumption had been reduced such that it was now better than Lincolnshire Road Car Co! Happy days! The regular site of a 5 cylinder double deck chugging along the main roads followed by a stream of cars was already familiar! I collected LFS125 from ECW at Lowestoft – the first time I had driven an FS with 5 cylinder engine and 5.5:1 back axle ratio, making it a very sluggish machine compared to the 6LWs with 6:1 back axle ratios that I was used to at Bristol Omnibus. I was assured when at BCV that an enquiry had been received from Norwich whether 5-cylinder engines could be fitted to the 30ft double deckers – presumably when the six rare FL vehicles were ordered and delivered with Bristol BVW engines (After my time these were changed to Gardner 6LW for better reliability and standardisation, I believe).
However this was a time when PSV fitters were being attracted away by the HGV industry which was having to get to grips with annual HGV testing at the newly set-up testing stations. Central repair works was beginning to slip behind in producing overhauled units and it was unthinkable in those days, and probably impossible, to find a contractor to help even if the engineer’s budget ran to it. So units began to fail in service and the running depots were having to spend more time carrying out major unscheduled changes that should have been done in the dock shops. The immediate solution was to write 40,000 miles for 30,000 miles and alter frequency of one or two unit changes! Things got more dire. In Peterborough ECOC pay scales were such that skilled fitters were attracted away to semi-skilled jobs in new industries, so Kings Lynn garage was given some major docks to do. Traffic conditions were getting tougher as well, new vehicles had compressed-air assisted brakes and were being specified with 6LW then 6LX engines to replace 5LW vehicles with resultant increases in wear and tear from greater braking and acceleration. The routine inspection and adjustment (in those days brake adjusters, clutch adjustment, battery topping-up were frequent manual tasks) slipped behind and the mechanical staff were depending on drivers to report defects. I’ll come back to this later.
I always had a bit of a penchant for design. I was able to put this to use in two items that were seen by many people and in the second case used by ECW on other customer’s vehicles. The first was the ‘PAY AS YOU ENTER Please tender exact fare if possible’ transfer that was applied to the exterior of all ECOC one-man vehicles for several years. I think the ‘if possible’ was my own customer relations addition, as even then I didn’t like ‘thou shalt not..’ notices on buses. The second was another small transfer which was required when time limits were placed by law on the use of horns during the night. All ECOC one-man vehicles were retrospectively fitted with reversing horns and reversing signs after one or two fatalities, one in Lowestoft bus station before my time, and one within Surrey Street garage. Now a switch had to be incorporated to turn the safety device off! Realising that few types of vehicles had similar dash panels and thus space, the transfer was designed to be used on all vehicles. I achieved this by incorporating an arrow that was in a square and could thus be cut off and placed at either end of the notice section and turned up, down or straight when applied. It was adopted by ECW as a standard! Another abortive bit of design was to produce bus stop plate designs for the Ipswich area incorporating both companies names and or colours. The standard British bus stop plate appeared not long after this effort, but it never achieved the main purpose, by which it was ‘sold’ to the industry, of being recognised as a statutory sign prohibiting parking of non-PSVs.
I was allotted the task of installing the first drive-through washes in the company. I spent a night or two and a day or two watching the run-in at Surrey Street so as to position the first drive through bus washing machine in Surrey Street, Norwich. It had to fit between the roof trusses and had a recirculation tank. It replaced a couple of Essex washers which dropped down around a vehicle and mechanically brushed the sides and rear leaving the front to be done by hand – one of these had to be extended to cope with the first 36 ft long vehicles. It had to cope with an allocation of about 240 vehicles (of which some 45 were in outstations overnight and an overflow on open ground across the road at the top of the bus station). Although I got the position about spot-on, (after all I had been driving for a fair bit of overtime on service driving at Bristol, as a graduate trainee), there were some operating problems. The wash was fitted with a felt blanket to deal with roof cleaning and it also swept a good volume of water off the roof of vehicles, but drivers were very keen to get washed and parked up. This meant that there were rather more gallons of water on the garage floor than was acceptable and some of this made its way towards the maintenance pits which in those days were at the city end and not enclosed. I discovered that a ‘dripping time’ of 20-30 secs within the exit ramp was all that was needed to improve matters drastically and this was implemented! This type of wash did not deal with fronts and backs. So the Depot Mechanical Superintendent (DMS) Alec Mortimer recruited four older ‘dependable’ part-time cleaners who succeeded in hand cleaning all the backs for the evening run-in as each bus stood before driving-through. The fronts never get so dirty and water coped between routine cleans! Then a night or two were spent in Hills Road, Cambridge to site their wash.
One problem I like to think that I resolved with the FLFs was that conductors couldn’t see forward to announce where they were. I designed a cut out in the nearside blind and a blanking plate in the cab which stopped reflection from the bright fluorescent lighting distracting the driver. I wonder what the Scottish group made of these when they were exchanged with VRT, thankfully after I had left for Maidstone!
With the arrival of a new General Manager, W. Tom Skinner, formerly chief engineer at Eastern National – the richer sister company down the road, policies changed! He wanted to keep himself ahead in engineering. Leo Page, the chief engineer at the time preferred being left alone to do what he was used to! The first change was from 6LW to 6LX in the second large batch of FLF double decks and the replacement by BCV of the Gardner 6HLX engine by a Leyland O.680 engine in one of the second batch of RELH coaches (I think it was RE890) as an experiment to improve the performance of the coaches which were perceived to be slow! [As an aside, this strategy didn’t work! Later I discovered that Crosville specified Leyland O.680 engines in their RELH coaches for the Liverpool London service due to complaints of slow running but found that the slower Gardner engine vehicles still got in first because their greater low speed torque got them up the hills faster than the Leyland versions. Later, when at Ribble, I complained to Leyland service engineers that 12m Leyland Leopards were being outperformed by the splendid heavier and bigger Bristol VRL double deck motorway coaches which also had Leyland O.680 engines. I was informed that the VRLs had the ‘Power-Plus’ truck engine which was not available in the horizontal format and in any case wouldn’t fit into the Leopard chassis frame if they tried! This was an indication of British Leyland at its worst and a pointer to its future demise!
The next ‘impressive’ idea was to install Dawson cyclone cleaners to make interior cleaning more efficient. I saw the system in use at Trent, Derby where a long straight service lane allowed the vehicles to line up with raised side platforms in place for the operator to enter the vehicle from the rear side emergency door to agitate litter with a compressed air lance to be sucked through the front door which was covered by the giant fan extractor unit. I was given the task of installing a unit in Surrey Street but had little conviction that it would be operable! There was no way any vehicle could line up in a straight line at Surrey Street – it had three or four side by side fuelling points and there was just room to drive from these through the bus wash at the back side of the garage. All I can say is that it was installed, mobile steps were provided and it got used during the day as outstation vehicles came into fuel. I can’t remember whether Hills Road, Cambridge received a unit.
New FLFs around this time were delivered with flaps that would open under the rear upper deck seats to let in an air current to take all the upper deck litter out through the front door. Earlier deliveries were converted later. Director George McKay on entering Cremorne Lane works and seeing the pile of flaps waiting to be fitted exclaimed “what’s all this f***ing stuff for?”!
Another fascinating episode involved the last MW (LM) buses. Two (or was it one?) were specified to have front entrance and centre exit with room for more than usual standing passengers and glazed quarter lights. Perhaps a good idea in principle for the Thorpe Station – Cringeleford route. But then you looked at the exit and the huge deep steps and shuddered! One was allocated to King’s Cliffe outstation to provide greater capacity (fewer seated, more standing) on the commuter inbound service to Peterborough! How long did that last? Why on earth didn’t they (was it Tom Skinner or Tilling group?) wait to use the lower-floored RESL (RS) vehicles which followed immediately in place of the outstanding order of MWs? The devil is in the detail.
Due to the poor earning potential of ECOC, it had always run vehicles to a great age and received second hand vehicles from other ‘richer’ Tilling group fleets to save capital costs. Tom Skinner was well aware that Eastern National was disposing of sound Bristol LS buses which would help the ECOC vehicle age profile and several arrived, the first stage carriage versions ever in the fleet and confusingly designate ‘LM’! Another innovation was the purchase of some Bedfords. There were 4 Bedford VAM with Leyland engines with Duple coach bodies, designated CB. I collected one of these from Hendon. They had very heavy steering! Also 4 Bedford VAM, 2 with Leyland engines, 2 with Bedford engines (to see what the cheap engine would do compared to the ‘heavy duty’ ones) with bus bodies by ECW, designated SB 661-4, I think. The driver had to get to his cab by walking behind his seat and squeezing forward, because the ticket machine and cash tray structure were mounted over the shallow engine cover. I had these rebuilt with a substantial engine cover to form the normal way into the cab. (These Bedfords are not mentioned in your website fleet list! Although I say here 4 + 4, I have just looked back through some lists of slides and notice that fleet number CB836 and 845 occur, so perhaps there were more or two batches? I also was reminded that ECOC had an earlier unique batch of Bedford SB chassis with Duple coach bodywork which had Gardner 4LK engines (- this must have been another of John Wood’s conversion projects!)
When Jack Robson retired as Assistant Engineer in June 1967, he was replaced by Eastern Area Engineer, Charles Mannell. Tom Skinner told me I was to replace him as Area Engineer. I told him that I felt totally unsuited to the job as I had had no practical training other than as a graduate engineer and holiday jobs, but could do the Assistant Engineer’s job! He said the area could run itself and that’s why he was putting me as Area Engineer for the experience – they will teach you the job!
The greatest advantage was a company car – no less than the retired Assistant Engineer’s car because Charles had long legs and had had his identical Austin Cambridge seat amended. Finding and looking after the outstations in Norwich and Ipswich districts was a joy – no carphones or mobile phones! I carried an oil can for garage door hinges and locks, lamp bulbs and a cloth and cleaner to keep the signs looking tidy. In 2½ years there was one outstation that I never found! Whenever in Diss, I changed the time clock to suit the time of year for the bus station lighting. It was the norm for the Ipswich and Central Works vehicle painters to spend the Summer repainting company property, including outstation garages and booking offices. I enjoyed deciding the colours to be used and remember having the ceiling in Bury St Edmunds booking office painted bright red and in Ipswich where the public wandered through an old office building between bus stations, I had the ceiling painted black so they could not see how irregular and tatty it was!
New vehicles were usually allocated to outstations so there would be no starting problems in the mornings. An MW (LM) allocated to Stradbroke (Ipswich district) did a run on one day a week into Norwich. The driver parked his bus at the back of Surrey Street garage and moved another one to block it in, so that nobody used his vehicle during his lay-over. I have a feeling that it had a plastic flower posy on the front dash!
In the Summer, Great Yarmouth was allocated extra coaches and the DMS was distracted by his wife’s lodgings business. I got to know from the experience of drawing my finger on the interior windows of a bus how long it had been since it had been cleaned – in Great Yarmouth it was often nicotine encrusted from over 8 weeks! Incredibly, come to think back, I cannot remember ever having to deal with any disciplinary action or formally meeting with any trade union representatives during my time as area engineer, except indirectly when we had a campaign check and rectification of heaters on all SC (LSC?) buses in Ipswich depot one cold winter. We had an apprentice at Great Yarmouth and at Lowestoft. I was concerned that the one at Great Yarmouth was not getting adequate training so arranged for him to spend time at Surrey Street where he could get a lot more experience – I suspect he had to travel back and forth by bus, so probably didn’t do much work!
Getting buses out of ditches was another regular item where I was shown how to do the job. My predecessor had designed, and had made in the works, ground anchors which could be secured to the soil with large angle iron stakes, to provide a winching point. I arrived one snowy morning at Bulmer Tye to find the Ipswich gang already well forward with recovery of a double decker. I was then approached by a GPO Telephone engineer’s van. He said he was looking for a cut in all the telephone cables along the road – then he saw the ground anchor! I was never advised what the cost was to our insurance. We did issue instructions to check for little concrete GPO posts before inserting stakes in future.
As mentioned before, the regularity of vehicle routine maintenance was slipping badly. This was a national problem and the Traffic Commissioners were beginning to get tougher by insisting on very high standards at the Certificate of Fitness inspections, such that depots could no longer just take a vehicle off the road, steam clean it and present it. [In those days a new PSV was given a Certificate of Fitness (COF) at the factory for seven years. It became the practice that at the first re-certification the longest period that was granted was 6 years if the vehicle was in good condition, 5 if not!, and at the second re-certification 5 years and so on. At ECOC the average age of vehicles was always high, so COFs became more frequent]. If the certificate ran out, the vehicle was off the road, full-stop! So, we tried putting all Norwich district COFs through central repair works where they took precedence over mileage docks. The regular inspection of PSVs by the Ministry of Transport was always carried out in the depot and each inspector was supposed to see each vehicle every year. It was not so regimented as it is now or was for HGVs at that time.
This was the time when no pay increases were permitted by government unless there was an increase in productivity. A work study scheme was begun for engine overhauling at Cremorne Lane works. Charles Mannell had experience of engine overhauling on a grand scale in South Africa and set about the job in a proper manner. This soon improved output and we began to find that engines were available when wanted. Later, these engines were declared to be poor quality at Surrey Street as they failed within a short period. Having already learned at this early age that most people tell you what they honestly believe to be the truth, there is usually an explanation if you dig in carefully. One day whilst ‘walking the job’ I asked a cleaner why he was topping up the engine oil of an MW (sorry, LM) when it came in from an outstation, as it was fitted from new with a Frankman Lubrimatic automatic top-up system which enabled the sump to be replenished from a reservoir. He said it didn’t work, so I had a look and discovered that it had been disconnected and the wide stub pipe onto which the normal filler tube should fit was left open without a cap. Depot Mechanical Superintendent Alec Mortimer was horrified and a quick check over the next few days as similar vehicles appeared for refuelling from outstations revealed several in this condition, thus sucking road dirt straight into the oil sump and causing rapid bore wear! Filler tubes and caps were ordered up and the Frankman’s officially and properly disconnected. The work study scheme was absolved!
Surprisingly the arrival of the first RELL (RL) and VRT (VR) doesn’t seem to have made a dent on my memory. It must have been without incident, after all they had automatic break adjusters and a fluid clutch! I can recall that a VR was converted to one-man operation fairly swiftly, our first double deck so equipped and allocated to Attleborough outstation to prevent overloading on the first morning journey- rather more successful than the King’s Cliffe experiment! This presaged the huge FLF for VRT exchange between the Scottish Bus Group and National Bus Company that followed soon after which greatly effected ECOC but not me!
By this time the 240 vehicles at Surrey Street were being inspected about every 8 weeks, if that, and the maintenance was running mainly on drivers’ defect reports. The fine performance of the three running shift chargehands kept the fleet on the road! As a small improvement, I had already increased the number of specific Norwich vehicles that were allocated to Cromer depot for routine maintenance. I then received a simple instruction from the General Manager (I think the Chief Engineer was off sick by now and was replaced by John Phelps just as I was leaving in late 1969) ‘I want all Surrey Street vehicles routinely inspected every four weeks – organise it!’ I think I might have said that this would mean buses not being available for service when broken springs, brake relines etc were found initially at a rapid rate, but no doubt got short shrift.
I sat down and worked out how many vehicles of each variety would be required every week day so that traffic would have an even flow of vehicles. I could see that there would be some efficiency gains when we got it going because we currently (I had inherited and who was I to query it?) had wandering battery toppers-up, a Dunlop tyre man unable to find vehicles he needed, interior vehicle cleaners scrubbing clean the older vehicles frequently and the newest and outstation vehicles rarely, the advert fixer never being able to find the right vehicles. I went to see Alec Mortimer the DMS and asked him what he would say if I told him that we have to inspect every vehicle every four weeks. He replied that he would take his white-coat off and go straight home! Never one to have a ‘meeting’, I sat on the radiator in his tiny office, we chatted around what would need to be done, and sure enough, it was my assurance that specific vehicles will be released by traffic on the allocated day, that caused him to say ‘give me another shunter and I’ll make it happen!’ And he did. Then immediately I was successful in getting the job of Assistant Engineer at Maidstone & District, an ex- BET company that was now, with the Tilling Group incorporated into the National Bus Company. My 2 ½ years there, with Vin Owen as my Chief Engineer, was a different world and another story!
I was followed as Deputy Assistant Engineer by Chris Jepson, who also came via Bristol Commercial Vehicles. When I left, the post of Area Engineer Eastern disappeared and Chris became Norwich District Engineer which newly incorporated Kings Lynn.

Geoff Pullin
01/2015

Thanks for this very interesting article, I don’t know how you can remember so many of the peoples names from those days, so long ago.
I worked at LUT in the 70’s and I struggle to remember names, but I can easily remember all the vehicles though !
I remember one chap though with reference to the information of the pre-decimal set-right machines.
We had none of those at Swinton depot, only TIM’s for 99% of duties with just the odd Bellgraphic (you wrote onto the ticket through a little window- the copy winding straight into the machines body after issuing the ticket) which were used on the X60/X70 runs.
This chap however knew how to fiddle a TIM. (You just asked for a favourite machine, if you had it before). He did it while on part day duty, where you did not sign off back at depot, hence you kept hold of the ticket machine until you did your back half duty. What he did was sit the machine into a vice, unscrew the handle and he made a short drill shaft with an end that matched the handle and by attaching an electric drill he wound the penny counters on through 10000 and stopped short of the start numbers, hence paying in say £16.00, when perhaps £20 – £25 had been taken. He was found out (sacked on the spot & prosecuted of course) when the overnight TIM checking staff found slight differences on the halfpenny & shilling catch, which was not moved onwards by the drilling process. All that effort for a few quid, once every three of four weeks. So it was not just Setrights that could be beaten !

Mike Norris


13/01/15 – 06:18

Geoff, what an excellent article. I was slightly later than you into the Bus Industry, PMT from 1968 – 1972. So much of what you have written applied at PMT even though the Companies were from opposite sides of NBC. We too installed a Dawson Cyclone interior vacuum at Hanley Depot with exactly the same problems and solutions as at Eastern Counties. As a raw recruit into the Industry I still marvel at things we ‘got away with’ (scheduled docks not carried out because of major unit failures; a liberal attitude to annual Ministry vehicle checks. PMT had a large fleet of both early Atlanteans and early Fleetlines, neither of which were particularly reliable followed of course by the great Roadliner disaster; Incidentally, you are Geoff who was Head of Department at Coventry City College in the late 90s/early 2000s aren’t you?
I hope you will continue with part 3 of your memories – at Maidstone and District – a good BET Company if ever there was one!

Ian Wild


13/01/15 – 08:55

Thanks for the article. I got quite excited because I think we are getting nearer to the answer to my occasional but unanswered query about those two hatches in the rear of ECW VR’s which I believe are for removing rubbish, but they sound more sophisticated than the Dawson systems described here. At least such things did exist! Did the VR systems blow or suck and were they for both decks? Did they work?

Joe


15/01/15 – 06:06

Thank you for a lovely article Geoff, and what wonderful memories. They are an important part of our transport history and need to be recorded. Your article took me straight back to my time with West Yorkshire Road Car, at their Harrogate Central Repair Works, where I started my apprenticeship in 1969. Your comment about the RE suspension beam being “b***** broken again!” reminded me that until I started work at 16, I didn’t really know any ‘asterisk’ words, but my knowledge was soon to be extended. Then – although in the main I did not tend to use such words often – at least I knew that should the occasion arise (such as striking my thumb with my hammer) I could feel confident in letting forth a decent expletive or two to compete with the best of them!
The ticket machine ‘turning back’ saga is fascinating, and must have caused quite a few headaches for the Company. It was a much more elaborate way of fiddling the books than the method used by one or two conductors up here. One older Harrogate conductor loved double-deckers on peak journeys, where he would rarely venture upstairs to collect fares when the bus was well loaded. Instead he concentrated on collecting the fares of passengers on the lower deck, and then took up position at the foot of the stairs. As passengers came downstairs to alight, he would take their fares as they passed by, issuing tickets of less value than the money taken, and pocketing the difference. Very simple, but very sad, and he was eventually dismissed by the Company when it had gathered enough evidence to take action. Like Eastern Counties, West Yorkshire operated the ‘heavy dock’ maintenance system, carried out by the main depots at Harrogate, Leeds, Bradford, Keighley and York. However, the Company also carried out full vehicle overhauls when a certain age or mileage was reached. Overhauls were carried out at Central Works and the nearby Body Shop. All mechanical and electrical units, major and minor, were removed from each vehicle, and then the chassis was inspected, cleaned and painted, before being fitted with newly overhauled replacement units from stock, and rewired. On completion, the vehicle would be driven around the corner to the Body Shop on Westmoreland Street. There the coachwork was overhauled, with corroded/damaged parts replaced, seat frames checked and repainted, upholstery renewed in the Trim Shop, and the vehicle fully repainted by hand and (in pre-corporate poppy red days) finally varnished to a very high standard. Before the advent of the LS and Lodekka, bodies were removed for overhaul in the Body Shop, and the chassis driven around to Central works for overhaul, which must have made access to all the mechanical components fabulous. On completion, the chassis and body were married up again in the Body Shop.
As with ECOC, WYRCC had a preventative maintenance programme in operation, to help maintain reliability, but like ECOC, it sometimes fell short of expectations due to similar shortages of depot engineering staff. It didn’t appear to affect Central Works and the Body Shop, but their staff did not work shifts or weekends, apart from occasional rounds of overtime.
We too had a ‘productivity scheme’ inflicted upon us and it was something of a farce from start to finish. The two men observing fitters and electricians repairing or overhauling all manner of items large and small, had not the slightest inkling as regards anything mechanical or electrical. They were constantly asking “What’s that part there?”, “What does that do?”, or “Why are you doing that?” In exasperation one day when asked “What do you call that?” while overhauling a Gardner water pump, Chris, the placid fitter I was working with said “Charlie”. The Time and Commotion man was not amused, but I certainly was!!
Thank you so much once again Geoff for evoking many happy memories. I can’t wait for the next instalment.

Brendan Smith


28/12/15 – 11:52

I returned to this page today and found the comments – thanks for your responses

To clarify the Dawson Cyclone interior cleaning system for Joe – There was a large metal box which rolled up to the entrance door and sealed around it with cushion edging. It had a large fan which sucked air through the doorway and out through the top of the box. It must have had a filter system, but I can’t remember that. Having got suction, there will be no air flow until an access for the air is provided. With single deckers, the emergency door was just right – usually on the offside and at the other end of the vehicle. An operator entered the vehicle through the emergency door with a compressed air lance with a long coiled piping and agitated litter from dead corners and caught around the floor which then shot up to the front door and out. It was less neat an arrangement when the emergency door was centre rear. On double decks, the operator had to walk to the back upstairs to push open the rear floor level flaps to let air in to sweep upstairs, complete with coiled air lance which caught around everything. It is one of those bright ideas that can work with a straight long service lane providing vehicles have offside rear emergency doors. The Trent installation at Derby seemed to work very well but where were the emergency doors on standard BET vehicles? – rear offside! Tilling companies, besides still having rear platform double decks, had lots of FLF / FSFs with centre rear emergency doors (but at least reachable without steps) and were putting centre rear exit single decks (RE) into service which needed steps!

Brendan speaks of West Yorks’ central workshop overhauls. When I was still a graduate trainee at BCV, one of three interviews I had for a first post was at Harrogate with Chief Engineer Marcus Smith. He showed me around – including a Lodekka stripped of units and the chassis painted with yellow phosphate paint, I think it was, to protect against the excess road salt. He also made the comment that they were looking for a self-starter technical assistant and not someone who needed to be cranked. I assume I needed cranking! I came across Marcus again when he turned up as MD at BCV.

Ian mentioned City College Coventry. After not being on the millionaire list on the break-up aftermath of NBC, I got a job as Head of School – PSV training at what was then Tile Hill College, not because I could teach but because I knew the industry! I reported to Bob Millington, an indefatigable enthusiastic FE engineer who was new in post just before me. In FE colleges thereafter the jobs change and increase year on year and the funding of courses changes half way through the year. It eventually got to me and despite having designed and got built a purpose built PSV training workshop, complete with pits and hoists, I was only too pleased to get out just after there was a reverse take-over when Tile Hill took on Coventry Technical College and became Coventry City College, only to abandon the new workshop within a short period.

My experiences of work study schemes really started at M&D, continued at Ribble and thankfully ended at UCOC – but that’s another story!

Geoff Pullin


28/12/15 – 16:55

Mention of various ticket machine ‘fiddles’ in this article remind me of an instance at Blackpool.
At busy times, ‘jumper’ conductors were used to help with fare collection. These men would board a busy tram, help the conductor by collecting fares on one deck, then get off and await the next tram. There was no set duty for these men, so no proper record of what trams they had to work.
One man was known as always refusing overtime and so was not normally asked but one day the depot inspector was particularly short the next day so asked our friend to work but he refused. The next day, the inspector himself was off duty and boarded a tram with his wife and was surprised to find “Joe Blogs” work it as a jumper.
When the inspector returned to work he asked his colleague how he had managed to persuade him but he insisted he had not! Further investigation eventually found (with police help) that he had a caravan, boat … and a long missing ticket machine”
In another case, a lady was walking her dog near a Manchester bus depot when a bus passed and turned a corner a bit sharply. As it did so, a roll of Setright tickets fell off the open platform. The helpful lady picked them up, made a note of which bus they fell from, and took them into the nearby depot. The roll turned out to be one of a batch that went missing sometime previously…

John Hodkinson


29/12/15 – 06:54

I think John Hodkinson means Ultimate Tickets, which being pre-printed had a value, and had serial numbers, so easy to trace.
Setright ticket rolls being blank and of no value, and unable to trace.

Stephen Howarth

Huntingdon Street Bus Station – Part Three

Not seen the beginning of this article click here.

My arrivals at Huntingdon Street between 1964 and 1969 were always by means of the North Western/Trent X2 from Manchester. Ribble vehicles could also be found on this service, as some journeys continued through Manchester to Blackpool, relabelled as X60s. As Robin Hood Coaches (pre 1961) and then Barton provided a daily express service between Nottingham and Blackpool, the terms of the X2 licence allowed through bookings but laid down strict conditions about the number of duplicates and prohibited any advertising save as a connecting service rather than a direct link. Unfortunately North Western and Ribble drivers were in the habit of parking up for their layovers next to the Barton inspectors’ hut, blatantly displaying “Blackpool X2” as their outbound destination! I gather that stern letters often followed such faux-pas. What follows is a summary of the activity on Huntingdon Street’s platforms during my many visits (or should that be pilgrimages?) during the second half of the 1960s. Most of these visits were made on Saturdays, but I did make several mid-week visits during the summer holiday periods. My earliest possible arrival time was just before noon, so I have also added details of other movements which avoided my personal attentions. It should be remembered that Platforms 1-4 were the southern half of the bus station, with 1 being adjacent to Huntingdon Street and 4 across from the municipal power station (or “Tram Depot”, a misnomer which spread from young bus-spotters to the later commercial developers of the site).

Platform 1

As noted in Part Two, this was mainly the preserve of Nottingham City Transport routes 25/25A which operated as circulars to Thackeray’s Lane in the north-east of the city. The 25 took the direct route first while the 25A went the long way around via Carlton before returning via the shorter leg. In the evenings and on Sundays the short leg was eliminated, with all journeys operating Huntingdon Street-Carlton-Thackeray’s Lane and return via the same route, showing service number 25 in both directions. NCT favoured open radiator Regent Vs for the route during my years at Huntingdon Street, usually with Park Royal bodywork.

Barton’s express service 9 to Skegness also used Platform 1, and an occasional double-decker was still used as a duplicate. On one visit in August 1966 I saw Barton’s unique lowbridge Loline parked next to Lammas Lodge with the blinds set for a trip to Skegness later in the day. By the 1960s though, this was an increasingly rare sight as traffic decreased from the post-war heyday. The more regular performers were single-deck coaches, especially the second-hand Reliances bought from the Cream Line group and elsewhere. For a while in the 1950s it appears that Barton’s service 34 to Llandudno also used this platform after being evicted from Platform 2 in the general swap-around after the Broad Marsh migration. This left before my arrival, got back after my departure, and left no trace of its existence on the bus station destination boards, so I really cannot say where it departed from in the 1960s.

Platform 2

Before the opening of Broad Marsh in 1952 Platform 2 was the domain of Barton alone, housing the busy 7/7A/8 cluster of services to the Calverton area and the less frequent services 22/24 to the Vale of Belvoir. After the mass migration Barton lost the platform to Trent who used it for the half-hourly 65 to Bunny (continuing to Loughborough every two hours as the 66), the high frequency services to Gedling and beyond (67-70/70A/70B/71, with a combined frequency of five per hour), and the half-hourly 76 to Burton Joyce (continuing to Southwell every two hours as the 74). A more frequent service to Southwell was provided by Mansfield District Traction service 215 which was the only non-Trent presence on Platform 2. This was usually operated by MDT Lodekka rear-loaders but I did see a couple of Regent IIIs on the service before their eventual withdrawal. The hectic Trent activity on the platform was mostly double-decked with PD2s and PD3s gradually yielding to Atlanteans during the decade. The exceptions were the 65/66 to Bunny/Loughborough which were the preserve of single-deckers, particularly the 36ft Leopard/Willowbrook DPs.

Platform 3

The Trent invasion of Platform 2 displaced Barton’s 7/7A/8 to Platform 3 where they took the space vacated by migratory Barton services 2 to Melton Mowbray, 6 to Keyworth, and 23/26 to the Vale of Belvoir. Barton service 12 to Leicester had also used platform 3 before 1952 but moved to platform 6 during the reorganisation of stands. The 7/7A/8 cluster of services was a bastion of Barton’s Leyland PD2 fleet, with both second-hand and “bought new” examples in evidence. Having the platform to itself Barton also tended to use the offside lane as additional parking, particularly for excursion and tour coaches.

South Notts’ fleet number 80 (80 NVO) was a 1962 PD3 with Northern Counties L65F bodywork, one of two such vehicles acquired just before the Lowlander years. In this shot, taken on 4th May 1968, it is seen leaving platform 4 for Loughborough. Visible in the parking area are three Trent double-deckers, and beyond them the distinctive clock housing of Lammas Lodge (John Stringer)

Platform 4

To my younger eyes this was the best platform on the bus station as it was allocated to independents other than Barton. South Notts Bus Co were the largest user in terms of departures, with their half-hourly route to Loughborough (which saw the frequency as far as Gotham doubled to every 15 minutes on Saturday) operated by a fascinating mixture of lowbridge PD2s and PD3s (two of the latter with front entrances) and low-height Albion Lowlanders. And before anybody points it out, I know that the Lowlanders had “Leyland” lettering on the fibre-glass radiator cowlings – I just prefer to ignore such corporate re-branding. On Wednesdays, Saturdays, and summer Sundays South Notts also had a single-deck presence on their village service to Thrumpton, providing a rare chance to see a Duple Roadmaster which didn’t have Dinky Toys stamped on its base-plate.

The second most frequent user of the platform was Gash of Newark, rightly renowned for its immaculate fleet of Daimler double-deckers. By the time I became a regular at Huntingdon Street the Massey bodied examples reigned supreme, some of them older chassis whose original bodywork by Strachans had disintegrated. Gash’s direct main road service to Newark ran hourly from Sunday to Friday, but half-hourly on Saturdays. A variation which abandoned the main road for Orston and the villages beyond before finding its way to Newark ran infrequently on Wednesdays and Saturdays only, with departures from Huntingdon Street at 1305 and 1505, If you were very lucky this might produce a sighting of one of Gash’s Willowbrook bodied Albion Nimbuses.

Here we have W Gash & Sons Daimler CVD6 it is on platform 4 and has a Barton BTS1 behind it on platform 3 – presumably on one of the 7/7A/8 cluster although I can’t read its identity or destination.

The third independent to be found on platform 4 was Skills, better known for its long distance tours than its local stage carriage route. As often happens in such cases the route in question was acquired as a by-product of purchasing another operator for its coaching licences. Skills acquired Jacklin’s “Elect Service” of East Bridgford in 1944 along with a half-share of the route from East Bridgford to Nottingham. A year later Trent bought Lewis of East Bridgford which operated the other half of the joint service. Surprisingly, Skills kept their half, operating a succession of new and used double-deckers on the route at a frequency of every 90 minutes, In the 1960s the Skills workings were covered by a pair of forward entrance Met-Cam bodied PD3s bought new in 1959 and looking rather odd in Skills two-tone green colour scheme. Trent operated their share of the service at an intermittent frequency as route number 73, often with open platform rear-loaders which looked very cold and draughty compared to the Skills machines.

Platform 5

Moving on to the northern half of the bus station, platform 5 was the closest to Huntingdon Street and platforms 8 (and later 9) the nearest to the parking area. Before the opening of Mount Street Bus Station platform 5 was the territory of Midland General, providing departure points for services towards Alfreton, Ilkeston, and South Normanton. In post-war years it was allocated to Trent express services, including the X2 to Manchester, X3 to Skegness, X4 to Mablethorpe, X5 to Cleethorpes, X6 to Blackpool via Derby, and X7 to Great Yarmouth. As the destinations suggest, all but the X2 were infrequent seasonal routes, so in the off-peak periods the platform served as a dumping ground for Trent vehicles on layover and was also used as a departure point for tours and excursions.

Platform 6

Barton’s half-hourly service 12 to Leicester was the company’s only contribution to platform 6, but was always worth checking as it offered a variety of single-deckers including the Yeates bodied Reliances and VAL14s. Trent’s service 62 to Mansfield via the direct route was slightly more frequent (every 20 minutes), but offered a more boring offering of PD2s/PD3s/Atlanteans. The platform was Midland General’s last foothold at Huntingdon Street, providing space for the hourly B8 to Mansfield via Hucknall and Rainworth ( a most indirect route compared to the 62) and two much rarer services, the Saturdays only F3 to Mansfield (which omitted Hucknall) and the peak-hour only A1 to Ripley. In my era the B8 and F3 were usually operated by a selection of Lodekka derivatives.

Trent’s 1957 vintage PD2/Met-Cam Orion KCH 127 was given fleet number 1027 when new, but later became fleet number 784 as seen in this 1970 shot. The vehicle is parked next to the Trent inspectors’ hut at the north end of platform 4, preparing for a departure from platform 7 to Bingham on the 79A. (John Stringer)

Platform 7

This platform was used by Trent’s (ex Dutton’s Unity) service 84 to Sutton-in-Ashfield which ran half-hourly on Mondays-Fridays and every 15 minutes on Saturdays. It shared the platform with Trent’s service 79 to Grantham (jointly operated eight times each weekday with Lincolnshire Road Car who showed the service number 33C on their rear entrance Lodekkas), the wholly Trent operated 79A which filled in the gaps to provide a half-hourly service as far as Bingham, and the hourly 63 to Chesterfield (jointly operated by Trent and East Midland, with the latter using service number 12A). The Trent workings provided the usual double-deck fodder, while East Midland provided lowbridge Atlanteans and Lowlanders for variety.

Platform 8

Two further services operated jointly by Trent and East Midland departed from platform 8. These were the Trent 64 (EMMS 36) to Doncaster and the Trent 80 (EMMS 37) to Retford. The 64/36, which took a bottom-numbing 2 hours and 50 minutes to reach its destination, operated every two hours on Sundays-Fridays, but hourly on Saturdays, while the 80/37 was two-hourly throughout the week. On the weekday schedule the two services alternated, but on Saturdays the vehicles operating the two routes left Huntingdon Street in convoy at even hours plus 40 minutes. The two services’ relatively low frequency left plenty of room for other departures, and after the Broad Marsh migration in 1952 the platform became the departure point for “other” express services, meaning those not operated by Barton or Trent. These included Black & White (operating to Cheltenham on behalf of Associated Motorways), Hall Bros of South Shields (with well-known express routes from Coventry to Newcastle via Nottingham), Lincolnshire Road Car (which operated seasonal services to Mablethorpe as route A and to Cleethorpes as route B), Royal Blue (to Northampton and then Bournemouth for Associated Motorways), United Counties (to London), and the Yorkshire Services consortium of EMMS, EYMS, WYRCC, YTC and YWD which came through in force twice each day en route from a huge variety of Yorkshire towns to more southerly termini in Birmingham, London, and Luton.

Until 1961 the platform was also the departure point for Robin Hood’s services to Blackpool, Morecambe, and Southport, and their joint service (with Barton) from Corby in Leicestershire to Glasgow. Barton’s service number for the Glasgow route was 58, and after they acquired Robin Hood the daily (year-round) Blackpool service became the 61, and the seasonal Morecambe/Southport services the 62/63. The operations continued on platform 8 as before.

East Midland’s 36ft Reliance/Willowbrook DP fleet number C272 (272 UVO) was new in 1964, and is seen here six years later on platform 8 operating a Yorkshire Services departure to Bradford. (John Stringer)

Platform 9

Although (in theory!) the timings of the Yorkshire Services companies’ twice daily stampedes through Huntingdon Street should have avoided problems with other traffic, experience soon proved that this idea was merely a utopian conceit. United Counties would often have two of their vehicles parked up in the offside lane of platform 8 for extended periods and Hall Bros were equally fond of this as a layover spot for short working duplicates. Then the Yorkshire Services convoy would arrive, only to find the boarding lane blocked by an East Midland double-decker or two as the convoy’s late arrival (due to traffic en route) had placed them into conflict with stage carriage departures. By 1968 enough complaints had been filed with the bus station’s municipal overseers to belatedly stir them into action. The railings between platform 8’s offside lane and the small nose-in car parking area were removed, a shelter erected on the paved area beneath (somehow managing to precisely match the architecture of those erected 20 years earlier on platforms 1-8!) and a sign secured to the lamp-post asserting that this was now platform 9. Basically it was there to provide a “go to” option for express services which could not reach their preferred habitat. At the same time the parking of private vehicles on the bus station (other than a few cars owned by inspectors and other officials) was brought to an end. The practice of mixing car parking with bus manoeuvring areas had never been that wise of a proposition and there had been several accidents over the years, thankfully none of them too serious.

Passing Traffic

Until their all too swift departure in 1966 Nottingham City Transport trolleybuses could be seen at the south end of the bus station, passing the William Booth Memorial Halls on King Edward Street and then either turning right into Bath Street or continuing in a straight line into St Anne’s Well Road. There was also trolleybus overhead wiring on Huntingdon Street, but I never saw it in use and can only presume that it was used by vehicles coming into or out of Parliament Street depot. Apart from the terminating 25/25A the only other corporation motor bus service to use Huntingdon Street was the 51, an irregular service timed to suit the employees of John Player’s tobacco factories on Radford Boulevard. The other end of the route was on Carlton Road, only a few hundred yards beyond NCT’s Parliament Street garage.

After the opening of Broad Marsh in 1952 two new Midland General services found a home there, the F2 to Ilkeston via Kimberley and the F4 to Beauvale Estate. Both of these services bypassed the worst of the city centre traffic by using Huntingdon Street rather than Milton Street, and were usually operated by single-deckers which provided a change from the blue Lodekkas on the bus station itself.

Finally, no account of Huntingdon Street is complete without mention of Hughie’s Cafe, immediately to the north of platform 5. In order to serve as many people as possible in as short a space of time as possible the proprietor had invented his own (more efficient!) way of making tea. Large industrial sized tea-urns were loaded up with tea at such a density that the result was barely fluid. Cups were then placed under the spigot and received an oil-like splash of concentrated tea. The cups were then placed beneath a boiling water heater and the beverage diluted to a more acceptable strength. Yes, it was disgusting, but it was all part of the experience. And Hughie’s prices were very reasonable when compared to those of the far less “colourful” Journeys End cafe in Huntingdon House

Neville Mercer
09/2015

25/09/15 – 09:59

I’d just like to thank Neville Mercer for this 3-Part article. Great reading and appreciable research. I first became imprinted on (initially Barton) buses when a young child in Calverton, so Huntingdon Street bus station has a significant place in my memory.

Stephen Allcroft


25/09/15 – 09:59

Speaking as someone who has lived in Nottingham almost all his life, I’d like to congratulate Neville Mercer on his excellent history of Huntingdon Street bus station. The piece contains a spectacular amount of information and detail, and not confined just to the bus station itself; there’s a fair amount of general history of Nottingham in there as well.
We lived on Clifton Estate, so most of my memories of buses were the services which went to Broad Marsh (the old and new versions). But we sometimes went to Nottingham on the South Notts services to Huntingdon Street, so I could be in the background of those 1960s photos.

KC


26/09/15 – 06:03

Thoroughly enjoyed the series on that wonderful place which came to my attention in the mid 60s, travelling from Yorkshire to visit my Grandad in Chilwell.
The range of vehicles was amazing: two particular memories are awaiting the massive influx of Hall Bros vehicles on their service, and taking years to unravel the Gothic script fleetname and realise that the Newark-based firm was Gash, not Cash! Such are the misconceptions of youth.
And thanks to Neville for at last appraising me of the origins of what I now know to be Lammas Lodge. A building which always fascinated me (but not as much as the Barton vehicles parked near it).

John Carr


27/09/15 – 05:51

Re the South Notts PD3, though the lower deck window layout is a little odd due to the position of the door, I just wonder how many 30 ft double deckers were built with four bay bodies?

Phil Blinkhorn


02/10/15 – 05:56

Neville Mercer, I applaud you for this article. Thank you.
Like many other people, I find these have tidied up/triggered off long dormant memories, may I add a few of my own:
The Grantham service, which was in my recollection, the only Lincolnshire service to reach Nottingham – how come the “33C” route number – what were routes 33, 33A and 33B?
In this context, someone recently tried to explain that suffix
A meant Any deviation from the main route
B meant terminates Before normal destination
C means Continues beyond normal destination
D means any other Deviation from normal route
Please let this start off another series of theories?
Changing the subject, I never twigged that South Notts 76 & 80 (Northern Counties bodied PD3s) were four-bay 30-footers. I suppose they were really more like four-and-a-bit since the upstairs front and back bays were rather long, resulting in the extra bit in front of the entrance doors.

I have enclosed a slide from the late 60s – I suspect the background includes “Lammas Lodge” am I right?

Rob Hancock


03/10/15 – 04:00

This series is absolutely brilliant. I lived in Nottingham or not far from it throughout the 50s, and can remember Huntingdon Street occupied by buses of every hue. Trent predominated, and seemed to be mainly pre-war Regents rebodied by Willowbrook – also I think a few utilities(?) and COG5s. At that time, Trent Leylands only seemed to figure on the No.8 from Derby, which came into Mount Street. Barton was still using a mixture of the famous Duple PD1s and PS1s, second hand PD1s from Leicester (and elsewhere!), and ex-Leeds Roe-bodied Regents and TDs. Midland General hadn’t yet received Lodekkas, and the height restricted route B8 was usually operated by lowbridge Regents of the RLH type. I can recall a trip to Sherwood Forest (Edwinstowe) on the East Midland 36 with a Guy Arab in the old sand-coloured livery. NCT’s 25, 25A and 25B were actually not all that frequent – only about half-hourly at that time, and often still run with the 1938 Met-Cam Regents – later superceded by the very similar 1948/49 batch, followed by the OTV Park Royal series. Interesting question about the Lincolnshire 33C – which again, I remember using about 1952, at which time we had a Bristol K going, and something different (a Leyland?) coming back. I am not certain, but I have a feeling the 33 may have run from Grantham to Bottesford – which would agree with the theory about “extension beyond normal destination” – but I had never heard the idea before. Just a small observation, the NCT 51 was never timetabled to start at Huntingdon Street – though I may have “loitered with intent” before proceeding to its starting point at the junction of Alfred Street South and Carlton Road, about two minutes run away.

Stephen Ford


05/10/15 – 07:10

Many thanks to all who have posted for their kind words. Perhaps I could respond briefly to a couple of the posts.
Yes, Rob, that’s Lammas Lodge and you can tell that the photo is taken after 1967 as that was the year in which Barton started using “X” prefixes for its express services. I should say officially, as crews on the 61 to Blackpool were given to displaying “X61” after acquiring the service from Robin Hood six years earlier – presumably as it mimicked the “X60” at the northern end of the route. Speaking of Lammas Lodge, I failed to discover any evidence whatsoever that it was once used as a police station as alleged in a couple of publications which show it in the background of photographs. As far as I can tell it was a park-keepers’ lodge at first, and then when no longer needed for that purpose (as the former park had disappeared beneath the bus station) it was rented out to private tenants. A retired military officer was the tenant in the late 1930s, and then by 1950 the tenant was the widow of a local professional boxer. One website refers to it as “St Michael’s Police Lodge”, but this is clearly wrong. The part of the future Huntingdon St where it was located was originally Millstone Lane. St Michaels Road started three blocks to the north of the site. Also, the only reference I can find on the Web apart from that local nostalgia site, is to a Masonic “St Michaels Police Lodge” in suburban London. Does anybody know any differently from authoritative sources (ie, not just repetitions on different sites of the original assertions?)
Moving on to the NCT route 51, I never actually said that it started at the bus station, but that it passed along Huntingdon Street between the terminal points as named. Perhaps I could have put it more clearly but by that stage deadlines were looming!
Once again, thanks to everybody, particularly to Stephen for the 1950s reminiscences.

Neville Mercer


06/10/15 – 07:01

Well, you live and learn! I had never realised that the NCT 51 ever went along Huntingdon Street (except the very north end, far beyond the bus station). Its traditional route was to head straight up Alfred Street (south, central and north) turning right onto Huntingdon Street just short of where it merges into Mansfield Road. The evidence was on my bookshelves in the 1971 timetable. Following the demolition and re-development of the St Anns area, Alfred Street ceased to be a through road. Thereafter the 51 started along Alfred Street south, then left onto St Anns Well Road, past the bus station, and left again (southwards) down Huntingdon Street, right into Lower Parliament Street, right into Glasshouse Street (back of where the Victoria station used to be) and left, back into Huntingdon Street (now heading north) just above the bus station – a long way round to go nowhere, no doubt caused by one way traffic restrictions.

Stephen Ford


30/10/15 – 06:33

Neville,
An interesting series of articles, thank you.
Nottingham City Transport service 19 started operation from Huntingdon Street to Lenton Abbey Estate from 24/11/29. From 28/11/37 it was extended to Gordon Road/Dowson Street (the area known as Bluebell Hill) still operating via Huntingdon Street bus station. From February 1939 it was further extended to Porchester Road/Haywood Road, before being curtailed to St. Ann’s Hospital from July 1939. Service 19 was altered to run between the Old Market Square and Lenton Abbey Estate from 06/05/45.
Service 25 started operation from Huntingdon Street from 15/11/31. All journeys, whether via Carlton Road or Mansfield Road operated as service 25, the a suffix for Mansfield Road journeys was not used until 1944.During the 1960s journeys outwards via Carlton Road operated as service 25 and retained this number when returning inwards via Mansfield Road to Huntingdon Street. Journeys outwards via Mansfield Road operated as service 25a and retained this number when returning inwards via Carlton Road to Huntingdon Street. Short workings to Westdale Lane Top via Carlton Road used service number 25b were introduced from 12/04/53.During the 1960s the service frequency was better than the 30 minute headway suggested by Stephen . Although this headway applied on Sundays the off peak frequency (all via Carlton Road) was every 20 minutes, with a combined ten minute peak service via Carlton Road operated by service 25/25b and every 20 minutes via Mansfield Road. Services 25/25a/25b moved to Queen Street in the city centre from March 1972.
Barton’s service 14 to Ruddington operated from Broad Marsh not Huntingdon Street. It was the 54 to Clifton via Ruddington that operated from Huntingdon Street. Barton’s service 12 to Leicester also called at Broad Marsh on the way to and from Leicester.
The new Broad Marsh bus station opened on 31/10/71 and South Notts and Gash transferred their Loughborough and Newark services to Broad Marsh from Huntingdon Street from that date.
I can’t think why NCT service 51 figures in the discussions as during the 1960s it operated via Alfred Street south, central and north and only used the short section of Huntingdon Street between Alfred Street north and Mansfield Road, which was some distance from Huntingdon Street bus station.
There was a third catering facility at Huntingdon Street in addition to Hughie’s Cafe and Journey’s End. This was not available to the general public as it was Trent’s staff canteen located behind the Trent booking office and was available to all bus crews using the bus station.

Michael Elliott


30/01/16 – 18:42

To Neville,
Thanks for the enthralling series. As one who does not know Nottingham at all, how much if anything is left of the area ?
I am not of course expecting any of the wonderful vehicles to be seen but if an opportunity arose to visit Nottingham are there any of the buildings still extant or has modernisation totally wiped the area clean of all traces.
Thanks for any information.

Mike Norris

Huntingdon Street Bus Station – Part Two

Not seen the beginning of this article click here.

At the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Nottingham’s Central Bus Station was in much the same condition as when it was built ten years earlier. There were still no shelters or seating on the eight platforms, and the only undercover accommodation for passengers was to be found at the south-eastern end, directly across from Platform 4. This area had a makeshift shelter (albeit on the only paved area in the bus station which had no departures!), a waiting room, some fairly disgusting toilets, and two phone boxes. This lack of any civilised facilities created good business for the two cafes adjacent to the bus station, and despite its exposure to the elements the ten year old site was already well over capacity. This was in part the City council’s fault as it continued to insist that all non-municipal services had to use the bus station, whether they actually wanted to or not. Street termini were to be the exclusive right of corporation vehicles.

Mount Street

The war might have been expected to ease the capacity problem, given that stage carriage services were slashed by 30% or more, but the missing timings on the traditional routes gave way to a host of vehicles provided for the military and for workers in local industries crucial to the war effort. Something had to be done and Nottingham City Council came up with a plan to establish a second bus station. This opened on a totally unsuitable hillside site at Mount Street in October 1944 and consisted of three platforms, curiously designated as 4, 5, and 6 – perhaps it was originally intended to be twice as large and nobody could be bothered to change the plans. On the positive side it had bus shelters on every platform. On the negative side the shelters’ canopies were made out of asbestos, seen as a perfectly acceptable material at that time.

As a result of this new competition the Central Bus Station became Huntingdon Street Bus Station. Services which left the city centre in a quadrant from the Hucknall road to the north to the River Trent in the west were transferred to Mount Street. The services which moved included Barton’s mainline routes to Castle Donington (3), Swadlincote (3C), Derby (5), Loughborough (10), and Coalville (11), Trent’s service 8 to Derby and their 60/61 to Hucknall and Mansfield, and Midland General’s B1 to Ripley, B2 to Cotmanhay, B3 to Alfreton, B4 to South Normanton, C5 to Alfreton, and C8 to Ilkeston. A further migrant was Midland Red’s X99 to Birmingham.

These services in total amounted to around 35% of Huntingdon Street’s traffic and their transfer made things far more manageable. But, as they say, nature abhors a vacuum and the return of peace in 1945 brought new problems. After six years of misery the general public wanted to travel and the space vacated by the Mount Street refugees was quickly commandeered by massive numbers of duplicates on the express services to the east and west coasts. In the early pre-war era Platform 1 was wholly occupied by Nottingham City Transport. Originally this area had played host to NCT services 19/22/25/25A, but the 19 to Lenton Abbey had been transferred to a street terminus on the Old Market Square (or “Slab Square” as it is universally known by locals) and the 22 to Hucknall had been eliminated at an early stage by an agreement with Trent. The remaining 25/25A circulars to Thackeray’s Lane were frequent but hardly justified their own platform.

Meanwhile Platform 2 was severely over-crowded at times of peak leisure travel. The problem was that Barton’s own high frequency 7/7A/8 to Epperstone/Calverton/Oxton had a continuous presence on the platform, which was also used by Barton’s twice daily service 9 to Skegness. A photograph taken in 1947 and used in several books shows a row of five brand-new Barton PD1A/Duple L55F double-deckers, all bound for Skegness on a single departure, completely blocking the platform with no local service vehicles in sight. Barton’s allocated platforms after the mass departure to Mount Street were numbers 2 and 3 (with the other independents using Platform 4), and Platform 3 could provide little relief as it was already full of Barton services heading across Trent Bridge to Melton Mowbray (2), Keyworth (6), Leicester (12), Ruddington (14), and the Vale of Belvoir villages (22/23/24/26). The northern half of the bus station could offer no alternative accommodation as it was already full of Midland General and Trent services along with a plethora of express routes.

As a partial solution Barton’s Skegness service was allowed on to Corporation turf at the rear end of Platform 1, with duplicates queuing alongside (but facing in the opposite direction) along Huntingdon Street itself. This proved to be a wise move as traffic soared to even greater heights in the late 1940s and early 1950s with Barton’s line-up of Skegness duplicates often reaching the northern end of the bus station with further vehicles waiting to emerge from the parking area next to Lammas Lodge. All of this traffic must have been good for the municipal coffers as shelters were finally erected on Huntingdon Street’s platforms in early 1949.

Two of South Notts’ Northern Counties bodied Lowlanders (82/82 SVO and 87 /FRR 87D) are seen here, driverless and completely blocking Platform 4. Parking discipline was never very good at Huntingdon Street! (John J Holmes)

Broad Marsh

An even bigger change was on the way. The Council had decided that two bus stations were no longer enough, especially in light of its decision to build a major new housing estate at Clifton to the south of the city. This would require many more new bus services and as these were to be operated jointly by NCT, West Bridgford UDC, and a privately owned operator (South Notts), the use of the Corporation’s carefully guarded street termini was unthinkable. On the other hand Huntingdon Street was now almost as full as it had been before the opening of Mount Street (which was also full and had overflowed into neighbouring side streets), so the Council bit the bullet and authorised the opening of a third bus station at Broad Marsh, to the south of the city centre.

It was ordained that this new development would accommodate all bus services leaving the city via Trent Bridge, but this soon caused rumblings of discontent from all concerned. The mass eviction to Mount Street had taken place during wartime, and it would have been unpatriotic to make too much of a fuss, but this was peacetime and there was talk of possible legal action by Barton and others if the Council attempted to send them to Broad Marsh against their will. A compromise was reached, with each operator being allowed to choose one service crossing Trent Bridge which could continue to be served from Huntingdon Street. Short workings and variations of those routes were also to be allowed to stay. Gash nominated both of their services to Newark, South Notts their workings towards Loughborough, Trent the 65/66 to Bunny and Loughborough, and Barton the 12 to Leicester. In the case of the latter three operators there was a reason for their choice of routes. Huntingdon Street was to the north of the city centre, and only 5 minutes walk away from Nottingham Victoria railway station. Regular train services connected this station to both Loughborough and Leicester, and if the competing bus services had been forced to move to Broad Marsh they would undoubtedly have lost some traffic to the trains.

The new Broad Marsh bus station opened in January 1952, and in addition to the entirely new services from the Clifton Estate became a haven for Barton’s services to Melton Mowbray, Keyworth, and the Vale of Belvoir, although for some unknown reason the Belvoir routes had a brief stay at Mount Street before transferring to Broad Marsh. A brand-new Barton service to Clifton via Ruddington (54) also used Broad Marsh, but their existing route to Ruddington (14) was allowed to stay at Huntingdon Street as it competed with Trent’s 65/66. After all of the departures Trent became the largest operator at Huntingdon Street, with Barton departures limited to the 7/7A/8 local services, the 12 to Leicester, the 14 to Ruddington, and the express routes to Skegness (9) and Llandudno (34). Despite this statistical fact, at any given time there were still far more Barton vehicles on the bus station than Trent ones. This anomaly was accounted for by the limitations of Huntingdon Street garage, across the road, which had no parking area of its own and used the bus station as a turn-out and layover facility. Most of the services transferred to Broad Marsh were still worked by Nottingham garage, either wholly or in part, and vehicles showing route numbers for the Vale of Belvoir cluster of routes could often be found alongside Lammas Lodge as late as the 1970s.

The Gash route to Newark via the main road was usually operated by double-deckers well into the 1970s, but here is their 36ft Leopard/Willowbrook saloon LO7 (YNN 650H) at Huntingdon Street to provide a little variety. (John J Holmes)

The Rise of the Shopping Centres

In the mid-1960s drastic changes came again. The City council decided that all of its bus stations should be situated next to shopping centres and sites were earmarked as an integral part of new city centre retail developments. The first of these schemes to be approved, Victoria Centre, was an ambitious plan to redevelop the site of Nottingham’s Victoria Railway Station. The station had been opened in 1900, jointly financed by the Great Central and Great Northern companies, and became the Nottingham halt for the GCR’s express services from Manchester and Sheffield to London (Marylebone). These lines competed directly with the Midland Railway’s services from their station at Carrington Street, to the south of the city centre, and by the 1960s the old GCR routes were seen as ripe for elimination by the infamous Dr Beeching. The London expresses came to an end in 1966, leaving only a six times daily service to Rugby operated by DMUs. It was a pitiful end for a station with 12 platforms, and the facility closed completely in September 1967. Demolition was swift, although the station clock tower on Milton Street survived, and work began almost immediately on the construction of the new shopping mall. The scale of the development was certainly impressive. As well as the retail units there were 26 storey flats above the centre, providing more than 400 homes, vast multi-level car parks, and a new (completely undercover) bus station.

Those of us who loved Huntingdon Street watched the new shopping centre rising from the ashes of the railway station with great trepidation, as its completion would surely spell the end of the neighbouring site. Fortunately I was spared the final rites as by 1970 I was the singer in a (semi-professional!) rock band, and musical commitments in Manchester at the weekends made visits to Nottingham, or anywhere else, few and far between. Huntingdon Street closed, without me to mourn it, in early 1972 (does anybody know the exact date?). My next journey to Nottingham, later in the same year, deposited me at the new Victoria Bus Station. It was horrible, in a Digbeth Coach Station sort of way but without the primitive charm, and was made even worse by the creeping advance of NBC poppy red and leaf green. I decided to take a look at the old site and was happy to discover that the parking ground by Lammas Lodge was still full of Barton vehicles. Barton rented this area from the City council until 1977 when their lease was terminated so that the site could be used as an enlarged surface car park. This was rather ironic as a much smaller surface parking area had previously existed at the northern end of the power station and alongside Platform 8. Despite having room for no more than 25 vehicles this had been supervised by a man in a hut. The development of a new Platform 9 in the late 1960s (and an increasing need for bus parking) had finally eliminated this facility. The Barton garage across the road survived until 1980 when most of its vehicles were moved back to Chilwell (from whence their predecessors had come way back in 1939).

The other two bus stations suffered similar fates. Redevelopment at Mount Street began in 1965 and the “traditional” bus station (I’m trying to be kind about it!) closed in 1968. For two years its services were scattered onto Maid Marian Way and other local thoroughfares before the completion of the new facility, another piece of nasty concrete modernism with no soul. More embarrassingly the shopping development adjacent to the new Mount Street Bus Station found it hard to find tenants (being separated from the rest of the city centre by a dual carriageway) and the entire place had that kind of virtually deserted futuristic look that made you expect an attack by Daleks. The bus companies didn’t like it much either. Barton gave it short shrift, moving their services to the new Broad Marsh within two years. Trent were next to go (in 1973), taking Midland Red’s X99 with them to Victoria. Mount Street became a Midland General mono-culture and closed in 1980, only ten years after its opening. It was not replaced and the remaining services went to Victoria. The new version of Broad Marsh (now attached to a shopping centre of the same name) opened in October 1971 and was an improvement for everyone except bus photographers, the previous pleasing skyline in the background of their Broad Marsh shots having been replaced by artificial lighting and a multi-storey car park where the sky should be. My fondness for the new Broad Marsh might have been influenced by events in my own life. In September 1973 I moved to Nottingham to be the singer in a new band, and a year later met my first wife in the city. We married in November (eight weeks after our first meeting) and – being impoverished – used a South Notts Lowlander on the Clifton Estate service to transport the wedding party from the registry office to our cheap and cheerful reception at a friend’s flat in Wilford. Well-wishers ensured that there was an abundance of confetti on Broad Marsh Bus Station.

As always seems to happen with my articles, this one has run well beyond its originally intended length. Part Three will draw this reminiscence to a close with a platform-by-platform survey of Huntingdon Street’s attractions between 1964 and 1972. If you have any good quality photographs taken at the bus station during those years I’d be delighted to see them and include them.

Neville Mercer
09/2015

To read part three Click Here