What's in the issue

A town or city’s municipal operation would always be marked by its fleet livery, as familiar to the average resident as the local butcher or greengrocer. But this would be punctuated from time-to-time by the colours of a much different operator, that of a regional bus company.

These operators didn’t take the school children home at 4.00pm, or take mum on her weekly shop on Saturday morning, the buses wearing the less-familiar colours took people to other places; towns and cities that at once seemed far away, especially in terms of bus travel, but were often the connection between neighbouring towns and cities, much like the railways, but serving smaller places in between that often didn’t have the benefit of a rail service.

In the north-west of England that operator was the Ribble Motor Company, its all-over red livery seen from Liverpool to the south of its territory, to Carlisle in the north. Very much Lancashire-based, centred on Preston, its tentacles also crossed the Pennines into Yorkshire at Skipton, where connections could be made taking passengers deeper into white rose territory.

Ribble also majored in express coach services to resorts and other destinations well beyond the county boundary, its legendary ‘White Lady’ and later, ‘Gay Hostess’, services providing the best of long-distance luxury road travel, the double-decker vehicles that sped along the newly-opened section of the M6 motorway wearing a striking livery that showed little, if any, of the corporate red livery of its buses.

Book No. 17 has a detailed account of Ribble’s extensive operations, with full colour images from the 1960s and ‘70s bringing the scene to vibrant life.

We also pay a return visit to the Halifax Joint Omnibus Committee to look at the services and vehicles that operated beyond the borough on its ‘B’ and ‘C’ operations, and another Joint Omnibus Committee, this time at Todmorden, nestled on the Lancashire/Yorkshire border deep in the Pennines, an operation that also became intertwined with that in Halifax.

Moving south and east into South Yorkshire, we take a look at the trolleybus and motorbus operations of Doncaster Corporation, while west, and just inside the North Wales border, we look at public transport in the walled city of Chester.

Although this issue has something of a norther bias, Geoff Lumb and his camera travelled far and wide, recording a superb collection of images in the University City of Oxford, where another interesting story is unfolded – Oxford providing the rare historic quirk of moving from horse-drawn trams to motorbus, completely bypassing the usual steeping-stone of electrifying its tramways.

There is plenty to enjoy in this latest edition and not just the buses themselves, but the fashions of the day, the shops, period cars and advertising. One hundred pages, bursting with nostalgia from a time when the motor car was a luxury and travelling by bus was part of everyday life for the majority of people.