Category: Articles
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Buses and coaches in Sale – Part 4
Neville Mercer 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…
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Buses and coaches in Sale – Part 3
Neville Mercer 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.…
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Buses and coaches in Sale – Part 2
Neville Mercer 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…
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Buses and coaches in Sale – Part 1
Neville Mercer 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…
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Buses and Coaches in Sale
Neville Mercer 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…
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Selected Memories of the last Chief Engineer of the old big United Counties
Geoff Pullin 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…
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Selected Memories of an Engineer at Ribble
Geoff Pullin 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…
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Eastern Counties Dennis/ECW Integral Buses
Roger Cox 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…
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W Pyne & Son Starbeck
Keith Todd My Name is Keith Todd, aged 82, and having been told about this website by my son, Ian, I feel I can contribute some interesting stories about Pyne’s. My father, Stan Todd, started working for Pyne’s in approximately 1947. George Pyne was the boss working from the original office doing the administration in…
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Guy Wulfrunian Demonstrator
Roger Cox The origins of the Wulfrunian design appear to date from 1957 and the prototype, OHL 863, took to the road in 1959. It was quickly followed by two demonstrators, 7800 DA in 1959 and 8072 DA in 1960, both of which were painted in a vivid livery of yellow with black trim, the…