For those interested in old buses (and coaches)

[RANGERS]

Did all Bedford OBs have a single Radyot Blue Spot foglamp mounted left of centre above the front bumper? I know ours (NEV 367, purchased in 1970 in, IIRC, somewhere in East Anglia and pictured below towards the end of her tenure with us) did and, in searching the web for OB images in the hope of finding NEV, I've found an awful lot of others with the same set up.

 

If anyone recognises NEV or has any information on where and how she began or ended her days, I'd love to hear.

 

Incidentally, the other auxiliary lamps on the front are headlamps from a very early Land Rover, one of the ones with separate lamps mounted behind the grille.

 

Scan_20161231.jpg

 

The additional nearside lamp was a PSV certification requirement, a part of construction and use regulations applicable to buses.

 

The coach here was registered in Essex but there doesn't appear to be any trace of who it was owned by, new or subsequently. OBs are reasonably well documented for the time but such was the scale of production, even the proportion missing is still a sizeable number.

Edited January 5, 2018 by RANGERS

[Gwiwer]

The Ford-Plaxton reminds me of the mercifully short period when several NBC fleets, still showing strong Tilling or BTC allegiances in their fleet make up, suddenly had Fords foisted onto them. Most had probably never seen one before other than for those occasions on a quiet Sunday morning when a driver might bring his Cortina in to get it over the pit for a cheeky pre-MoT check-over.

 

The look on the face of one long-serving Southdown drivef at Worthing when first asked to take an R1114 on the 067 National Express to London was priceless. Not only was he expected to sit beside rather than above and ahead of the engine but it wasn’t a Leyland.

 

Those fleets which were allocated the bus-bodied R1014 model got rid of them pretty quickly too.

[RANGERS]

The Ford-Plaxton reminds me of the mercifully short period when several NBC fleets, still showing strong Tilling or BTC allegiances in their fleet make up, suddenly had Fords foisted onto them. Most had probably never seen one before other than for those occasions on a quiet Sunday morning when a driver might bring his Cortina in to get it over the pit for a cheeky pre-MoT check-over.

 

The look on the face of one long-serving Southdown drivef at Worthing when first asked to take an R1114 on the 067 National Express to London was priceless. Not only was he expected to sit beside rather than above and ahead of the engine but it wasn’t a Leyland.

 

Those fleets which were allocated the bus-bodied R1014 model got rid of them pretty quickly too.

 

One of the fleets I was associated with inherited a pair of the M reg Southdown Fords, PUF 249 and 252 I think they were. 49 seats and top slider windows, being Duple Dominants, those sliders were just more things which could rattle, like they needed any more.

 

The NBC lightweight experiment was purely a money saving exercise, it was judged that if Bedfords and Fords were good enough for most independent operators to use on rural services and coaching duties, they were good enough for NBC fleets. Oddly Midland Red had the first go at it and the success of the early Ford saloons there spurred the NBC hierarchy to extend the programme across the country, very few fleets escaped at least one of the two marques. In the days of 6 year Certificates of Fitness, that was usually the break point and most went on the expiry of the CoF.

[Gwiwer]

Top slider windows combined with a forward-mounted partially-intruding engine made those things incredibly noisy. A very long way from the relative refinement of a Leopard even if the Fords could climb hills. It took a good deal of stick-management and engine whine to coax a Ford up the long gradients through the South Downs though.

[PhilJ W]

Top slider windows combined with a forward-mounted partially-intruding engine made those things incredibly noisy. A very long way from the relative refinement of a Leopard even if the Fords could climb hills. It took a good deal of stick-management and engine whine to coax a Ford up the long gradients through the South Downs though.

Should have got AEC Reliances with AH760's.

[RANGERS]

Should have got AEC Reliances with AH760's.

 

We had plenty of those, flying machines which unlike the Leyland's, could actually go and stop in the right order, albeit it could be tedious keeping them in a straight line. The ZF manuals were the best, the change on the semi-autos was usually too slow to make the most of the torque the 760s had at higher revs, by the time the gear engaged, the revs  had dropped.

 

Of course when the Volvo B58 appeared, the world changed, suddenly everything that went before seemed very antiquated. By the time the B10M appeared, Volvo had stolen a huge march on the established Brits, the rest is history.

[leopardml2341]

These were rather novel, first coach I travelled on with reclining seats:

 

https://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Ffarm6.staticflickr.com%2F5600%2F15467550307_4826054a80_b.jpg&imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fpicssr.com%2Fphotos%2F38556445%40N08%2Finteresting%2Fpage17%3Fnsid%3D38556445%40N08&docid=JaydcpaApfGKrM&tbnid=-xGF6QoT5WiQgM%3A&vet=10ahUKEwjhyuCDosTYAhVEDuwKHYI2Dg0QMwg9KAAwAA..i&w=1024&h=605&bih=600&biw=960&q=willowbrook%20spacecar&ved=0ahUKEwjhyuCDosTYAhVEDuwKHYI2Dg0QMwg9KAAwAA&iact=mrc&uact=8

[RANGERS]

A mix of pictures from Cambridgeshire today dating from the early 60s through to the 1990s. Once again, mostly operators no longer with us but we do still have Cambus, as a subsidiary of Stagecoach, and Whippet, part of Tower Transit.

 

The shots include several of the AEC Reliance 760 and one of the Volvo B58 mentioned in previous posts, with bodies which make them indistinguishable from the outside. The Premier AECs were exceptional, even by AEC standards, renowned in the industry as perhaps the best coaches of their generation anywhere.

[runs as required]

Sad to learn from the above post that Premier Travel no longer exist.

Living near Epping in the early 1950s those distinctive two tone blue coaches used to waft through past the cattle market in the High Street bound for impossibly distant places up the map..

The Cambridge JE registered Alexander bodied Reliance looks interesting sporting Manchester and Blackburn destination blinds. Could that be a rebodied chassis carrying an original NWRCC/National Express Alexander body off a Leopard?.

 

dh

[John M Upton]

Ah, Ford chassis.  West Sussex County Council had a number of Ford's in the late 1970's and early 1980's with various almost Prison Van like bodywork.  I particularly recall the very square Locomotors bodied pair.

 

They were all universally awful!!  In the end they were binned in favour of a eccentric but comfortable collection of Plaxton Supreme coaches (mostly Bedford's I think) and ECW bodied Bristol RE's including the rather lovely early 1970's coach versions of which one ex Trent example apparently still survives.

 

I was horrified when they "modernised" the fleet with US built Bluebirds which were amazingly even worse than the old Ford's and riddiculously high floors with multiple steps when all else were starting to buy low floor buses.

Edited January 6, 2018 by John M Upton

[RANGERS]

Sad to learn from the above post that Premier Travel no longer exist.

Living near Epping in the early 1950s those distinctive two tone blue coaches used to waft through past the cattle market in the High Street bound for impossibly distant places up the map..

The Cambridge JE registered Alexander bodied Reliance looks interesting sporting Manchester and Blackburn destination blinds. Could that be a rebodied chassis carrying an original NWRCC/National Express Alexander body off a Leopard?.

 

dh

 

Premier standardised on Alexander Y Types for a decade or so up to 1975, this was one of the penultimate batch. The coach is on one of the daily services Premier ran jointly with Yelloway, and later National Express, between East Anglia and Lancs.

[Gwiwer]

The final shot of that batch, of which the subject is an ECOC Bristol RELL dp at VCS, nicely illustrates the brief post-deregulation era in local coach operations. The 797 was one of three Victoria - Cambrdge routes (797-9) commenced under the new legislation jointly with a by-then ailing Green Line which was seeking new markets. Green Line had previously been allowed no further than Bishop’s Stortford (though with a Stansted Airport extension to its 720 late in its life) while ECOC territory definitely didn’t include the likes of Harlow or Stratford until these joint operations began.

 

Next to the RE is a Southdown grant door Leopard / Plaxton Supreme in 777 “Flightline” livery for the non-stop route of that number to Gatwick Airport operated under the same regime and also jointly with Green Line.

 

Green Line offered grant door AEC Reliances for the 777 and 797-9 group of which some had Plaxton Supreme bodies (RS class for Reliance Scarborough) and some with Duple Dominant (RB - Reliance Blackpool) bodies.

 

Now does anyone have any photos of the highly unlikely and short-lived post-deregulation Dover - Blackpool through service operated jointly by Maidstone Borough Council, Blackpool and Rossendale? That was perhaps the most bizarre joint operation ever and it was no surprise that such an enterprise proved unsuccessful. It was, however, a unique experience to be able to board one of Maidstone’s coaches at around 2am as it passed through east London and simply pay the driver for a return to a distant location in the north-west of England

[Gwiwer]

Ah, Ford chassis.

Southdown purchased a pair of A0609s with quite stylish midibus bodywork. One was allocated to Storrington for a couple of weekly shopper runs (288 Kirdford - Brighton and 289 Kirdford - Chichester) replacing more frequent but lightly used routes. On other days the vehicle was used for some more localised trips in the Ashington - Storrington - Thakeham - Amberley area. The other went to Petersfield for a revised and partially new cross-town link numbered 362 between Moggs Mead and Steep. After a couple of years both vehicles moved on. The routes were worked (with difficulty owing to road width) by Nationals until they were withdrawn in that form.

[uax6]

I can remember when Cambus was formed (from ECOC) and the new pale blue livery. What I don't is why it was formed. Was it a precursor to deregulation?

 

Andy G

[RANGERS]

I can remember when Cambus was formed (from ECOC) and the new pale blue livery. What I don't is why it was formed. Was it a precursor to deregulation?

 

Andy G

 

NBC privatisation required the units being sold off to be of a maximum size, to reduce the monopoly position and encourage competition, 250-300 vehicles was the guide from memory. Eastern Counties was split into Cambus, Ambassador Travel and Eastern Counties, Cambus taking the Southern and Western area of the old company. It was sold to a management led consortium backed by venture capital. It was further subdivided when the Peterborough and western operation became Viscount Travel but still under Cambus ownership. The group enlarged when the express and tour coach operations of Premier Travel were acquired in 1989, Milton Keynes Citybus the following year and Miller Bros in 1992.

 

The company was sold to Stagecoach in Dec 1995, the MK City operation subsequently passing to Arriva to comply with MMC requirements and Premier was eventually closed when the group withdrew from coaching.

[John M Upton]

In the same vein, Southdown and BH&D were split up again.  Brighton & Hove forged ahead, Southdown on the other hand faltered somewhat before falling under Stagecoach.

[RANGERS]

Nottinghamshire provides the source of the pics for this batch, not all taken in the county but all operators based there and most of which are still around in some form.

 

Trent are still the predominant bus operator in Notts. A Leyland Leopard L2 with Harrington Cavalier body, the livery a non-standard combination of NBC colours in the style of the previous Trent red/ cream scheme.

Skills are among the largest independent operators in the country, based on the outskirts of Nottingham and with over 100 vehicles. A rare Leyland Panther coach, one of four supplied to Skills in 1969/ 70 with Plaxton Elite 51 seat coach bodies. Always in the shadow of its stablemate Leopard, the Panther was never a popular model, coach versions of it were extremely rare.

Bedfords were always in the minority with Skills, heavyweight models predominating, but these were representative of the marque in the fleet in the 60s and 70s. Both with Plaxton 45 seat coach bodies, a YRQ Plaxton Elite III on the left alongside a 1968 VAM14 Panorama.

Mansfield District merged into East Midland prior to being sold and ultimately absorbed by Stagecoach. The Leyland Leopard was the standard in the 1970s, this coach version with Duple bodywork typical of the breed.

Lamcote, based in Radcliffe on Trent, ceased trading in the 1990s. This vehicle was a relative rarity, a Plaxton Paramount body on a Leopard chassis. Body and chassis were common in other combinations but rarely combined together.  

Another from the East Midland fleet, these Leopard Willowbrooks were common across virtually all of the ex BET fleets, the term "BET Style" having been coined for what were essentially identical vehicles bodied by a number of bodybuilders.

Barton, once the UK's biggest independent bus and coach operator, merged with Trent in 1989 but the name survives as Trent Barton. They had previously acquired Robin Hood Coaches in 1961, bringing this and a number of identical AEC Reliance - Harrington Cavalier sisters into the Barton fleet.

The Government bus grant scheme gave operators an incentive to buy new vehicles for use on local bus services, the loophole of allowing the subsidy to apply to coaches equipped with destination displays and wide entry doors, providing they were used on services for a specific proportion of their mileage, was widely exploited. With a hefty local service commitment and a substantial demand for coaches on touring, private hire and express work, Barton were perhaps the biggest benefactors of the scheme for this purpose, replacing over 600 vehicles before the scheme ended in 1982. This was one of the first, a Bedford YRQ with Willowbrook 45 seat dual purpose body.

This shot of Broad Marsh Bus Stn typifies the Nottingham scene in the 1960s, the former GC in the background and three Barton Leyland PD1s awaiting their next duty. Two are chassis rebuilt be Barton and rebodied in the 1950s with high specification Duple dual purpose bodies. The third is an ex West Riding example. Just creeping into shot is the rear of 772, an AEC Duple Elizabethan, one of a number originally supplied new to Cream Line Motors of Bordon and equipped with a roof rack for transport of band instruments when carrying military musicians.

 

 

 

[pH]

Wot, no South Notts?

[Two_sugars]

Bartons also acquired Hall Bros of South Shields in 1967. . When I moved to Leicester in 1970, I used to "come home" on the Bartons service. It used to be about a 7 hour journey including an hour stop in Doncaster.

 

 

John

[SRman]

I have edited some video out of a whole lot more of my trip to England in 1999. This shows some buses and coaches around York, very briefly in Skelton, and Leeds city in February 1999. Unfortunately, the quality is not the best because of the reduction for YouTube and also the image stabilisation used, but it does show a good variety. It ends with parts of a trip on a rattly Fleetline on the way to my mother's place in Barwick in Elmet; the bus goes through Cross Gates and past the Optare factory. The Appleby and Alternative Travel coaches at York were being used for rail replacement on the Scarborough leg.

The Fleetline was a bit of a come-down compared to what went some years earlier, when the West Yorkshire PTE Metrobus operator always rather appropriately used MCW Metrobuses on this route (65) to Aberford - the Metrobuses included mark 1 and mark 2 vehicles, with MCW and Alexander R type bodywork. To be fair, there were Alexander Strider bodied Scanias in blue and silver livery used as well at other times. I didn't possess a video camera in those earlier visits, and was still learning to use the one used for the video, at the time.

Edited January 12, 2018 by SRman

[RANGERS]

Wot, no South Notts?

 

Try this one, a Bedford SB5 with classic Duple Bella Vega 41 seat body bought new by South Notts in 1964. This is perhaps the archetypal coach of the 1960s, independents and larger group buyers took them by the dozen, it would be an ideal candidate for Oxford Die-Cast.

 

Bartons also acquired Hall Bros of South Shields in 1967. . When I moved to Leicester in 1970, I used to "come home" on the Bartons service. It used to be about a 7 hour journey including an hour stop in Doncaster.

 

 

John

Bartons acquired Hall Bros and the associated Taylor Bros businesses in the late 1960s bringing with it a fleet of Bedford, Ford, Leyland and AECs with Harrington, Plaxton and Duple bodies which mirrored the Barton fleet of the era. The daily express services were along a corridor from Newcastle to Coventry and the Doncaster stop at Glasgow Paddocks was a refreshment stop and interchange with Barton's anglo-Scottish services. In later years this moved to Barnsdale Bar services on the A1.

 

These pics were ex Hall Bros Coaches, the first is a 1967 Leyland Leopard with 51 seat Plaxton Panorama coachwork. The fleet number H78 was the initial number scheme Bartons introduced but all were later given Barton numbers in the 11XX number range.

 

This one is an identical vehicle dating from 1965, pictured on layover in Pool Meadow, Coventry. The date is later than the previous shot, the fleet number shows the final series

 

This is a later Leopard Plaxton dating from 1971 and was from the first batch of over 300 bus grant specification Leyland's supplied to Barton. The location is Glasgow Paddocks.

 

There are some further photos of the Waterdale Bus Stn which include a number of Hall Bros coaches here - https://www.flickr.com/photos/8755708@N07/sets/72157629427630641/

[RANGERS]

London and the South East provides this batch of shots from fleets which again have all ceased to exist in their previous form

Frames Rickards were one of London's most respected operators which ceased in the early 2000s. This vehicle dates from 1984, a Leyland Tiger  with Plaxton Paramount 53 seat body.

Bests of London NW10 were noted for running all manner of exotica, including Leyland Panther and Mercedes Benz coaches. A slightly more conventional combination was this AEC Reliance Plaxton Supreme.

Another example fo the AEC Plaxton pairing was this 1970 example

Real exotica was this Mercedes Benz 0302 belonging not to Ipswich Town FC, but Beestons of Hadleigh in Suffolk and which ran in Ipswich Town colours for the team transport contract.

Glenton were another London operator, famous laterly for their fleet of centre door AEC -Plaxtons, things were being re-assessed when two Volvo B58 - Duple Dominants joined the fleet in 1977. Duple coachwork never figured again, Glenton ceased running their own vehicles in the late 1990s, contracting their tours to other operators before ceasing trading completely some years after.

Limebourne were yet another London operator which has disappeared. This was a rare combination of AEC Reliance with Spanish built VanHool Aragon coachwork, only a handful of which were built.

Whilst National Express are still a familiar brand, Cheltenham based Black & White Motorways are a memory now and were the operator of this AEC Reliance- Plaxton Supreme. Black and White were absorbed into National South West and disappeared in 1976 but the name reappeared in the division of that company in the prelude to privatisation in 1984.

 

This AEC and the VanHool example were among the final AEC vehicles built in the months before production at the Southall works ceased in May 1979.

 

[runs as required]

Some interesting pics - I especially enjoyed the Ipswich Benz, I used to run annual university field trips to the north of Ghana from UST Kumasi in one of a pair of these 0302 buses in the early 1970s, beautifully smooth vehicles - even on unsurfaced roads. State Transport used to run a fleet of Setra buses in the same years between the main regional cities and Accra. Rear engined, they were much noisier - I wondered whether they were air cooled like the occasional English buses fitted with experimental Deutz engines.

 

Can I ask the location of the second one down, the Bests Tours 'chara' adjacent to the church with the 'French' looking public building in the back?

It seems very familiar for some reason -  the sandstone, presumably Victorian Gothic, has a west midland or NW England look about it.

 

dh

[SRman]

In the 1970s I rode a good many Mercedes 0302 coaches (with Australian bodywork). As dh said, they ran beautifully smoothly, even on our rough roads. On one occasion, there was an absolutely full load of people and luggage on board, and running late (we left Brisbane late right at the start), we were on the Bruce Highway somewhere between Nambour and Gympie (Queensland) on a very rough bit of road that had been patched and patched again repeatedly. There was a bang, and all of a sudden the ride got much bumpier. One of the suspension airbags had burst.

The driver pulled off the road, at that time just soft dirt shoulders, not helped  by recent rain. The coaching company always thought to provide a spare airbag (just a thick, hollow rubber cylinder, really) in the hold, and the driver duly retrieved that. Then came the problem of jacking up the offending end of the coach; in the soft dirt, the coach stayed exactly where it was while the jack descended into the ground! So then all of the passengers were co-opted into finding suitable solid pieces of wood to place under the jack and spread the weight. 

We eventually got going with the replacement airbag in place, about one and a half hours late. We made good time after that, and eventually got to Rockhampton (400 miles north of Brisbane) about 45 minutes late.

To the driver's credit, he took it all in good humour and just accepted the delay as being unavoidable.

[Prometheus]

We had plenty of those, flying machines which unlike the Leyland's, could actually go and stop in the right order, albeit it could be tedious keeping them in a straight line. The ZF manuals were the best, the change on the semi-autos was usually too slow to make the most of the torque the 760s had at higher revs, by the time the gear engaged, the revs  had dropped.

 

Of course when the Volvo B58 appeared, the world changed, suddenly everything that went before seemed very antiquated. By the time the B10M appeared, Volvo had stolen a huge march on the established Brits, the rest is history.

Taff Ely had a couple of manual AEC Reliance saloons: for all of the wrong reasons, they were enormous fun to drive, especially on the dualled A470!

 

Tony