Category: Articles
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North West Independents – Book Review
One of the recent titles from Venture Publications is Neville Mercer’s review of Independent Bus Operators in North West England, number 31 in the Super Prestige series. Although I have been based in Hampshire for over 40 years, my roots are in the North West, Bolton and Lancaster to be precise, so I had to…
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Guernsey Motors/Railways Fleet Number 77
A 1958 Albion Victor FT39KAN with a Reading FB35F body Registration 8226 – YFO 127 Guernsey fleet number 77, an Albion Victor followed a string of Albion’s supplied to Guernsey Motors and Guernsey Railway. Designed externally to look like coaches they are in fact buses, Licensed to carry 35 seated passengers and 7 standing, 27ft…
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Buses and coaches in Sale – Part 4
Not read from the beginning click here Part Four – Local Coach Operators When I lived out in the middle of Cheshire and made monthly shopping trips to Manchester with my parents, the number 36 passed the garages of three coach operators as it travelled along the A56 through Altrincham and Sale. The first was…
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Buses and coaches in Sale – Part 3
Not read from the beginning click here Part 3 – Express Services The A56 trunk road entered the Borough of Sale from the north at Crossford Bridge, where the River Mersey marked the boundary with Stretford (and Cheshire’s boundary with Lancashire), and was known as Chester Road until the junction with Dane Road. It then…
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Buses and coaches in Sale – Part 2
Not read from the beginning click here Part Two – North Western In 1923 British Automobile Traction, the motor bus subsidiary of BET, restructured its “branch” in Cheshire and northern Derbyshire as a subsidiary known as the North Western Road Car Company. At that time the new company had major bases in Macclesfield and Stockport…
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Buses and coaches in Sale – Part 1
Not read from the beginning click here Part One – Manchester Corporation Sale is divided into two equal halves by the A56 trunk road which runs along a north north east to south south west axis through the centre of the town. Three main east-west routes cross the A56. The southernmost of these (Harboro Road…
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Buses and Coaches in Sale
Introduction Until the age of nine I lived in a small village near Northwich in the middle of Cheshire. One of the delights of these younger years was the monthly family shopping trip to Manchester, usually on a Saturday, which involved a long journey on North Western’s route 36. By the early 1960s the vehicles…
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Selected Memories of the last Chief Engineer of the old big United Counties
I arrived in Northampton to take up the post of Chief Engineer of United Counties Omnibus Company (UCOC) in 1978 after training as a graduate engineer Tilling Senior Trainee at Bristol Commercial Vehicles Ltd in Bristol, Area Engineer at Eastern Counties in Norwich, Assistant Engineer at Maidstone & District and Assistant Chief Engineer at Ribble…
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Selected Memories of an Engineer at Ribble
After graduate training at Bristol Commercial Vehicles, I started my career at the frugal but efficient Tilling Group’s Eastern Counties. When the National Bus Company (NBC) was formed, opportunities increased and I moved to Maidstone and District – an ex-BET group company that liked its heritage, invested in lots of new vehicles but nothing in…
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Eastern Counties Dennis/ECW Integral Buses
In 1938 and 1939, Eastern Counties took delivery of 18 Dennis Aces with ECW B20F bodies and Gardner 4LK engines. Two more unfrozen examples arrived in 1941. In 1947, at a time of acute vehicle shortages, a prototype Beadle chassisless bus appeared in the Eastern Counties fleet. It was one of four Beadle prototypes being…