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A Century of Edinburgh’s Trams and Buses AVAILABLE NOW!
When Edinburgh Corporation assumed control of the city’s transport network in 1919 it inherited a creaking cable tramway that was increasingly prone to breakdowns.
Initially there were no buses in the fleet but by the end of the year 15 Leylands had been bought and these proved invaluable as the new management set about the task of replacing the cable cars with modern electric cars, a process that was completed in 1923. While the electric trams were the backbone of the city’s public transport for the next 30 years, the bus fleet was growing, serving areas away from the tramlines including the new housing areas that were built in the 1930s and 1940s.
In the 1940s and 1950s many British towns and cities were looking to replace their trams with buses, and under new management Edinburgh controversially started the process in 1952 and the last trams were withdrawn in 1956. At its maximum, the tram fleet was 371-strong. To replace them and expand into new areas, Edinburgh invested in more than 480 new and rebuilt buses.
Local government reorganisation in Scotland in 1975 meant that the corporation buses passed into Lothian Region Transport ownership and bus deregulation in the 1980s allowed Lothian to expand well beyond the city boundaries into the adjacent East Lothian, Midlothian and West Lothian areas. It also permitted competition, and as Lothian was expanding into new territory beyond the city, the Eastern Scottish company was quick to compete on city routes.
Control of Lothian passed back to the City of Edinburgh Council in 1994 and a new management team in 2000 recast and simplified the city’s bus network and invested heavily in the newly-available easy-access low-floor buses. This paved the way for future expansion, leading to the creation of East Coast Buses serving East Lothian, and Lothian Country serving West Lothian.
By this time Lothian Buses was the largest bus company in the UK in local authority ownership and in addition to its bus network and its popular open-top bus tours it ran high-quality bus services linking the city with its fast-growing airport. And from 2014 the airport was additionally served by the new Edinburgh Trams route from the city centre, which was intended to become part of a new tramway system that would grow to cover other parts of the city.
A Century of Edinburgh’s Trams and Buses tells how the corporation and its successors built a well-regarded award-winning business that carries 110 million passengers each year. Over 220 quality images support the text and there is a detailed list of the buses that have served Scotland’s capital city.
Twenty Turbulent Years
The Transformation of Britain’s Bus Industry, 1980-2000
In 1980 Britain’s bus industry was stable and settled, and largely in public ownership. In much of England and Wales the National Bus Company was the major operator, while in Scotland it was the Scottish Bus Group. London Transport was in charge in the capital, and local councils or recently-formed passenger transport executives ran most of the other major bus fleets.
In the second half of the 1980s local bus services were deregulated, and by the beginning of the 1990s most public sector bus operators had been privatised. It was a massive change. By 2000 NBC and SBG had vanished. The PTE and London Transport bus operations were now run by private sector businesses, as were most of those which had been in local authority ownership.
Twenty Turbulent Years follows the drastic dismemberment and gradual reshaping of the bus industry over this period, combining over 275 high-quality images from across the country with lively and informed narrative charting the changes in company ownership, vehicle manufacturing and operators’ purchasing policies.
Advancing in a Forward Direction
Everything you wanted to know about the Scottish Bus Group’s vehicles in one volume. Advancing in a Forward Direction is the enigmatic title of Fawndoon’s second Scottish-themed bus book, and in 192 pages with 300 photographs and comprehensive tables it gives details and background information on every type of bus and coach bought by the Group from 1946 until privatisation.
But Advancing in a Forward Direction is much more than dry lists of buses. In the main section of the book, dealing with new purchases, author Stewart J Brown provides an authoritative and sometimes critical overview of each model purchased, setting the Group’s vehicle purchases in a historical context. He looks at SBG’s conservative engineering policies and the Group’s unfortunate relationship with early rear-engined double-deckers.
Contemporary insights, high standard of production
Stewart Brown quotes from contemporary documentation, finding press criticism of vehicles such as the rear-engined Albion Viking (for its gear-changing) and the impressive M-type Motorway coach, described by one journalist at the time as “a rather ghastly mistake”.
Two further sections are devoted to vehicles acquired from the operators the Group took over, and vehicles bought second-hand, around half of which came from London Transport.
London’s Bus Purchases 1946-1994
There are many excellent books about London’s buses, but this one is unique. In one volume it lists every bus and coach bought by London Transport and London Buses from 1946 until privatisation in 1994. At the start of the period LT was taking delivery of its last wartime buses. At the end, the first of a new generation of low-floor buses were being delivered.
Standardisation was one of LT’s aims, as evidenced by such well-known types as the RF, RT, RM and DMS. But over the postwar years an incredible variety of types were purchased, from Leyland Titan PD1s to Dennis Lance SLFs, not forgetting small buses such as Metroriders and Dennis Darts.
Informative text
The vehicle lists are supported by informative text giving an overview of the various vehicle types – with an acknowledgement by LT in 1984 that responsibility for the problems it experienced with its Daimler Fleetlines could not all be laid at British Leyland’s door.
Almost 150 photographs illustrate the unexpected variety of the London bus fleet over five decades.
Scotland’s Buses in the 1960s
Scotland’s buses in the 1960s were represented by a striking and colourful range of operators, liveries and technologies. Some vehicles still on the road dated right back to pre-war years, while others heralded the new era of low-floor single-deckers and rear-engined double-deckers.
In this attractive new book, Stewart J Brown evokes the flavour of that period through a remarkable selection of colour photographs covering the length and breadth of the country, most of them previously unpublished. Region by region, his engrossing commentary puts bus operations in their context, while his entertaining, detailed and sometimes witty captions convey a remarkable amount of information about individual vehicles and their historical significance.
Bringing the period vibrantly to life
The vast majority of pictures were taken by the late Harry Hay, who spent a lifetime immersed in the industry, and wielded his relatively basic photographic equipment to astonishingly good effect.
This was the era when the new Alexander companies – Midland, Fife and Northern – were coming into their own; when David MacBrayne still held sway in the Highlands; when independents continued to play a major role in the industry; and when traditional municipal liveries were still to be seen in Scotland’s four biggest cities.
Scotland’s Buses in the 1960s brings all this vibrantly back to life.
Glasgow’s Buses
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Glasgow Corporation Transport was one of Britain’s biggest municipal bus operators, with a fleet which peaked at almost 1,500 buses and trolleybuses in 1962. Glasgow’s Buses tells the story of this mammoth operation, from the growth of its bus fleet in the 1930s, through to the decline in public transport use which started in the 1950s.
The book explores the vehicles, the routes and the Corporation’s troubled venture into bus body building. It chronicles the creation of the PTE in 1973, and the upheavals caused by the deregulation of local bus services in the 1980s.