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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 became Cross Street up to the School Road/Ashton Lane junction and finally Washway Road all the way south to the Altrincham boundary. It was an extremely busy road back in the 1960s for a variety of reasons. Firstly there was the “traditional” traffic which had used the route as the quickest way from Manchester to Chester, (and then on to North Wales) since Roman times. Secondly there was the extra traffic generated by new housing estates in both Sale and Altrincham, and thirdly there was the opening of the Cheshire section of the M6 motorway. In the decade and a half before the creation of the M56, the already congested A56 became the main link between Manchester and the original southern section of the M6 (which then ended at the A449 to the north of Wolverhampton).
The road congestion had its brighter side for a young bus enthusiast. All kinds of exotic long-distance coaches could be found amid the traffic, most of them moving slowly enough for legal lettering to be read. A fair number were operating on the many express services which passed through the borough. The most frequent of these was the X97 version of the Tyne-Tees-Mersey pool. A few journeys on this service reached Newcastle, but most of the vehicles ran from Leeds to Liverpool via Huddersfield, Oldham, Manchester, Sale, Altrincham, and Warrington. The X97 ran every two hours, alternating with the X99 (via Eccles in lieu of Sale and Altrincham) to provide an hourly frequency from Leeds to Manchester and Liverpool. At one time the workings via Eccles had been operated by Lancashire United and those via Altrincham by North Western, to appease the local licensing authorities in those towns, but by the 1960s LUT and North Western coaches were to be found on the X97 variant in equal quantities.
North Western’s main contribution to the X97 came in the form of “Black Top” Willowbrook dual-purpose vehicles built on both Reliance and Tiger Cub chassis. Towards the end of the 1960s the Reliance coaches with Weymann Fanfare bodywork which had been the regulars on the few through journeys to Newcastle were replaced on these duties by 36 ft Leopards with Alexander Y-type bodywork. LUT used a mix of all its underfloor engined dual-purpose fleet, including examples bodied by Burlingham, Duple (Midland) Plaxton, and Northern Counties (the latter were often described as the only coaches built by NCME in the post-war era, but they looked like DPs to me!).
The LUT/NWRCC hegemony over the Manchester-Liverpool end of the X97 was occasionally disturbed by interloping vehicles from the more distant members of the Tyne-Tees-Mersey pool. A West Yorkshire vehicle (usually a Bristol LS – the half-cabs never seemed to get further than Lower Mosley Street) might be seen once a month but they were never common. Between 1962 and the end of the decade I only ever saw one Northern General coach working the X97 through Sale (a rather nice Reliance/Harrington Cavalier in 1965) and United were rare at Lower Mosley Street and unknown in Sale and Altrincham. One vehicle which did pass through on an X97 in the summer of 1966 was a Durham District Services Bristol LS, carrying dual stickers which proclaimed it to be “On hire to United Automobile Services” and “On hire to North Western”
The London Services
The majority of North Western’s express services from Manchester to London also passed through Sale. Until 1960 North Western’s express routes had not been given service numbers (although vehicles capable of displaying them showed any number used by a joint operator). In the 1960 numbering scheme the assorted Manchester to London services were all given the number X5, but with a letter suffix to indicate their precise route. The suffix letters were identical to those allocated by Midland Red to the routes as a (largely theoretical) joint operator which helped to avoid confusion between the two systems when bookings were being made or the spoils divided. The five variants running through Sale were the X5L (the traditional daytime service via the Potteries and Birmingham), the X5M (the overnight equivalent of the X5L), the X5N (a faster night service which omitted Birmingham), the X5P (a short working from Birmingham to Manchester and the only one of the services where Midland Red contributed a vehicle), and the twice-daily X5Z (the quickest of them all, operating non-stop from the Tabley interchange on the M6 – six miles south of Altrincham to Mill Hill in north London, except for a brief refreshment/toilet break halt at the Blue Boar).
All the variants of the X5 used North Western’s newest coaches. When I first moved to Sale this meant VDB 907-916, the 36 ft Leyland Leopards with Alexander Z-type bodies known inside the company as “stretched Highlanders” – a term which always made me think of William Wallace in the hands of the King’s torturers. The original “Highlanders” (RDB 832-851 of 1961) had been Reliances with the more usual 30 ft version of the Z-type body. The ten stretched Highlanders remained unique as 1963’s express service Leopards carried the new (and very stylish) Y-type body which became North Western’s standard coach until the end of the decade. Despite what you might read in the PSV Circle fleet history of North Western (not one of their better efforts!) the company referred to the Y-types as “Travelmasters” and not “Highlanders”.
Midland Red’s token presence on the X5P arrived in the Manchester area at lunchtime and any hopes of exotic home-made C5 coaches were inevitably dashed by the sight of a Willowbrook bodied Leopard DP or one of the Duple Commander coaches delivered in 1965. It was almost as if BMMO worried about North Western stealing its advanced technology while the vehicle was on its lunchtime layover. I did once see an old S15 on the X5P, so presumably the technology on that type had already been declassified.
The Coastal Services
While Midland Red was categorised as a joint operator on the express runs to London, the express services from Manchester to the northern half of Wales were licensed solely to North Western, despite running in Crosville territory for the vast majority of their mileage. This was, in a sense, Crosville’s own fault. When the services had begun in the late 1920s Crosville had lobbied for local authorities in North Wales to deny licences to incoming operators. As a result North Western had operated its expresses as “period returns”, selling seats only at the Manchester end. The company had known that Crosville would object to any other arrangement (even though the Taylors’ company had made no attempt to operate its own expresses to Manchester), and when road service licensing began in 1931 North Western merely sought licences to preserve the status quo. As a result no revenue was collected in Crosville territory and no pressure could be applied under the “Combine” agreement for a share of the service or the revenue. In later years Crosville agreed to a relaxation of the uni-directional restrictions on the routes as they provided a useful link to the North Western/Ribble hub at Lower Mosley Street, and a commission on a ticket sale was better than nothing.
Off-season the North Wales services were maintained by a solitary journey from Manchester to Llandudno on the X24, but in the summer peak months the menu increased to include the X3 from Manchester to Barmouth, the X4 to Aberystwyth, the X34 (a variant of the X24 which ran via Prestatyn), the X44 (to Bangor), and the X74 (to Pwllheli). On a summer Saturday in the 1960s the seven “service” coaches allocated to these routes (usually Reliances with Harrington Wayfarer IV or Weymann Fanfare bodywork in 1962, Y-type Leopards by 1969) might be supplemented by up to three times that number of “hired in” coaches, most from Manchester area firms but with a sprinkling of names from further afield such as Niddrie of Middlewich and Bostock of Congleton. Duple and Plaxton bodied Bedfords predominated, but they came in a pleasing variety of liveries and passed through in waves at set hours of the day – unless the terrible traffic congestion in North Wales at that time had forced a reassessment of the return schedule!
One other North Western coastal express passed through Sale, in this case travelling in the opposite direction to the North Wales cluster. The X65 started in Northwich, passing through Altrincham, Sale, and Manchester on its way to Scarborough. Northwich depot only had three coaches (the service coach on this route in 1962 was either an elderly “KDB” Fanfare or a newer but more spartan “Black Top”) so at times of peak demand this route could also offer some interesting hires. The most numerous seemed to be Ford/Thames Traders with Plaxton bodywork belonging to Les Gleave’s Crewe-based subsidiary Roberts Coaches, but an occasional Salopia Bedford SB3 could be seen despite the “dead” mileage from Whitchurch to Northwich. From closer to home, Jacksons of Altrincham might also provide duplicates from their home town eastwards. Interestingly, Altrincham Coachways (a North Western subsidiary since 1958) never did, perhaps confirming the story that their general manager frowned on lending vehicles to the parent company as “they always come back filthy and with something wrong!”
Surprisingly, perhaps, there was never a North Western express service from Sale to Blackpool. This discrepancy is accounted for by the fact that the licence went to an incumbent operator, Pride of Sale Motor Services. This company will be dealt with in Part Four. One Blackpool service did pass through Sale but was not allowed to do business. This was the X36, which was shown in the North Western timetables of the 1960s as a single service from Sharston, the Wythenshawe estate, Timperley, Altrincham, and Urmston, to Blackpool. In reality it was worked as three separate services, one from Sharston and Wythenshawe (a licence acquired from Mayfair Travel in the late 1950s), another from Timperley and Altrincham, and a third from Urmston. The Sharston departure could often be sighted scuttling through Sale along Brooklands Road, Marsland Road, and the A56 northbound, aiming for the new M62 motorway (now part of the M60) from Stretford to Worsley and beyond it the A6 to Preston and then west to Blackpool. The Timperley and Altrincham variant came straight up the A56 through Sale before joining the Sharston vehicle for the route along the M62 and A6.
Another major coastal service had nothing to do with North Western, but (a little confusingly) used the service number “X5” albeit without a suffix letter. Yelloway’s famous service from Rochdale, Oldham, and Manchester to Cheltenham, Bristol, Exeter, and Torquay, passed through Sale on a daily basis during the high season, and three times per week in the colder months. Cavaliers had just taken over from Seagulls in 1962 which could explain why I still say hello to YDK 590 on every visit to the Manchester Museum of Transport. Longer Cavaliers followed before Harrington ended production and Yelloway turned to Plaxton for its bodywork. Nice as the Cavaliers were, they were far from the only attraction on this service. On summer weekends duplicates from Black and White Motorways, Greenslades, Grey Cars, Hebble, and Royal Blue were a frequent occurrence along with an assortment of Bedfords and Fords from smaller companies. Sale was actually a better vantage point to see these vehicles from than central Manchester, as many of these hires were loaded up first at Rochdale (or in the case of the Hebble machines arrived already fully loaded from Yorkshire) and then despatched non-stop to Cheltenham or beyond. They still had to travel along the A56.
Odds and Ends
PMT’s service X2 from the Potteries towns to Manchester passed through Sale twice a day and at times of normal traffic was usually operated by a relatively recent coach (in 1965, for example, Duple Commanders), but in the run-up to Christmas or on a day when Stoke City was playing a Manchester team, double-deckers were often deployed in the shape of a Weymann bodied lowbridge Atlantean or a Northern Counties Fleetline. The route always seemed to be doing very well or very badly with no happy medium. One day there would be a full Fleetline duplicating a full service coach. The next day the service coach would have nobody but the crew on board! It was easy to see why North Western had never sought a share of the route. Crosville finally reached Manchester with two “shoppers express” services in the early 1960s, the X69 from Pwllheli via Denbigh and the X75 from Llanidloes via Newtown. As with North Western’s much more numerous incursions into Crosville country, no attempt was made to acquire revenue from the outer terminus, and in effect these two services were little more than day excursions dressed up as expresses. Both services passed through Sale, the sight of their Bristol MW coaches achieving little more than a reminder of how a pig-headed and arrogant founding family can lose many opportunities, both for themselves and the travelling public. If the Taylors hadn’t held a grudge dating back to North Western’s acquisition of Mid-Cheshire in 1924 we could have had frequent, jointly operated, services from Manchester to Chester, Crewe, Wrexham, and the North Wales coast.
Neville Mercer
04/2014
Link to view Part Four – Local Coach Operators
08/04/14 – 07:58
I totally agree about Lancashire United’s Northern Counties-bodied “coaches”. The PSV Circle’s definition of DP is a bus shell with coach seats (or occasionally vice versa). It’s a useful classification, although I think “semi-coach” might have been a more accurate description of what it denotes, since the ability of a vehicle to be used for more than one purpose is a much more complex issue. The problem with these particular vehicles was probably that no-one else was ordering single-deckers from Northern Counties at the time, and therefore no-one could really say what their standard bus shell looked like.
They were rather splendid though, internally as well as externally. The standard of interior finish on these and other LUT DPs of this period was second to none, probably exceeding that of the true coaches that succeeded them when DPs went out of fashion.
Peter Williamson
09/04/14 – 08:24
I think there were plenty of cross boundary traffics between company territories which were underdeveloped over the years. It was one of the consequences of the route licensing regime – influenced not least by the possibility of railway objection.
This article prompted me to turn up W J Crosland Taylor’s 1948 book – The Sowing and the Harvest.
Regarding the 1923 discussions with the Mid Cheshire directors, he wrote “Alas! our skill in these matters was not as good as it became later and they got their price – selling to the North Western Road Car Company the next year. We were wild about it, but our wildness was tempered with admiration for our good friend George Cardwell (NWRCC), who had got the better of us on that occasion, and soon after that we met Cardwell at the Abbey Arms and over a friendly glass of beer agreed a pooling arrangement of joint services from Northwich to our territory which has worked well ever since.”
Those don’t come across as the words of a begrudging “pig-headed and arrogant” writer to me!
Mike Grant
10/04/14 – 12:33
Hi Mike, I’m afraid that I am not an admirer of any of the Taylor family, but particularly “WJ Crosland-Taylor”. I put that in inverted commas because he was born without the hyphen – Crosland was his second christian name. The fact that he would change it to sound more aristocratic says a lot about the man.
I’m also unconvinced by the mock generosity of his words about George Cardwell, written 25 years after the fact. From other accounts I would suggest that the “wild” part was the more honest reaction. And the sitting down in the Abbey Arms surely occurred several years after the Mid-Cheshire debacle when both Crosville and North Western were required by their new lords and masters (the “Combine” of Tilling & British and the railways) to hammer out area agreements regardless of how much they disliked each other. As regards “arrogant”, I would refer you to comments made about Welsh villages and the Welsh people in his various books. I think that they might agree with my verdict!
Neville Mercer
11/04/14 – 17:49
As far as I can establish, the joint Crosville/NWRCC services predated the Tilling B A T influence which I agree could have been a factor after 15th May 1930 when the Crosvlle firm was reconstituted.
144 Runcorn – Northwich began in the back half of 1928; 145 Crewe – Northwich shows as a joint service in the 1/10/29 Crosville timetable and 146 Chester – Northwich first appears in the 15/5/29 publication.
I have no doubt that there may be others sharing your views but equally from my experiences of North Wales in the ’70’s, “the Crossville” as it was often referred to, was a well respected part of the local community. The founders were long before my time but they did build a significant transport business and it is perhaps inevitable that almost “Branson- like”, they upset a few a people along the way.
Just to add to your observations about X69 and X74 I don’t think it quite accurate to say “no attempt” was made to attract bookings from the eastern end. NWRCC Northwich and Altrincham offices were both promoted for ticket sales in the service leaflets as was Lower Mosley Street. The vast majority of the traffic was for shopping and Saturday football excursions but single and period returns were available and used.
I enjoyed reading your piece but felt it worth pointing out for the record that there was another slant on Crosville history. One wonders if it‘s a consequence of having green blood!
Mike Grant
14/04/14 – 18:23
I’m left a little confused by your “green blood” comment Mike, having described the founder of Crosville as having the physical appearance of a hybrid between Ebeneezer Scrooge and a malevolent goblin (if you don’t believe me, look at a photograph of him!) in my book on North Wales independents. I presume that goblins do have green blood, but I suspect that you might have been referring to loyalty to Crosville.
I would agree with you that Crosville was a well run company in the period between the end of the war and NBC, and that it’s service network was far more comprehensive than my own beloved North Western (much as I loved this company its rural network was pathetic). My complaint is purely with the founding family who used tactics which were frequently disgraceful to achieve their near monopoly of bus services in North Wales. The evidence for this is far too bulky to present on this website, but much of it is in my North Wales book.
I take your point about the joint services from Northwich, but would suggest that the two operators’ cooperation was more to forestall any new competitors starting up before the 1930 Road Traffic Act (it was known long before the actual Act that fundamental legislative change was on the way) than an indication of a rapprochement.
As regards the X69 and X75, the leaflets may well have tried to produce traffic from the eastern end, but in all the years covered by these articles I never once saw a leaflet for the Crosville routes in either the Lower Mosley Street booking office or in Altrincham bus station’s enquiry office. I guess that you had to ask for them. Also, the two services were not mentioned on Lower Mosley Street’s signs, although in reality they operated from the former Finglands side of the bus station.
One last thought. I’m having trouble thinking of the Taylors in the same breath as Richard Branson. Surely a better comparison would be to Stagecoach, although Crosville’s anti-competitive tactics made Stagecoach look like saints. An ever apter comparison might be made to John D Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, which achieved its dominance by every kind of underhand tactic known to the business world. Admittedly a couple of the Rockefellers’ competitors had their refineries destroyed in mysterious fires, and I would never accuse the Taylors of going to that extreme. The Rockefeller monopoly was dissolved by Act of Congress in 1911 and split up to form Esso, Mobil, Chevron, Amoco, and a dozen other prominent oil companies. I think that a forced dismemberment of Crosville would also have been in the public interest. They could have given the successor companies names such as Mona Maroon, Llandudno Royal Blue, Brookes Brothers, and so on. The enormous reach of Crosville served their shareholders far better than the traveller. Even on the long distance express services, where a level of coordination existed between the assorted independents long before Crosville muscled in.
I think that we’ll have to agree to differ on this one, Mike.
Neville Mercer
