A pictorial history of the Midland Red bus company, from its beginnings to its final days, by one of its former bus operators.Midland Red in Retrospect covers the period during the 1960s when the Midland Red bus company dominated the Midlands, operating the lion's share of the bus services and also the express coach services from the Midlands to London and other locations.Like London Transport, Midland Red had a very distinctive image and its own fle...

The story of Midland Red is well known in enthusiast circles, and those lucky enough to have experienced the company at its peak can well remember the fleet of nearly 2,000 bright red vehicles not only cheering up the industrial areas of the Black Country and the East Midlands but blending seamlessly with the bucolic charms of the Vale of Evesham, Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Shropshire. Regrettably, most images captured when the company was at its peak in the 1950s and 1960s were in m...

The legendary East Yorkshire Motor Services has been providing bus services in East Yorkshire since 1926. With buses painted in a distinctive livery of indigo blue and primrose yellow the company became famous for its ‘Beverley Bar’-shaped double-deckers operated through Beverley’s North Bar between 1933 and 1970. With distinctive destination indicators and the Willebrew ticket system, here was a company with its own very idiosyncratic way of doing things. Author Bernard Warr has been an e...

The West Riding of Yorkshire boasted the most complex railway network in Britain, comprised at various times of seven railway companies, with an eighth trying to secure a foothold, eleven significant joint lines and several minor systems. With no overall strategic pattern of territory or route, the companies seemed to vie incessantly for supremacy, often at the expense of efficiency with the significant duplication of facilities: over twenty-five towns and villages had two passenger statio...

On 21 May 1969 Dr Richard Beeching officially reopened the railway between Buckfastleigh and Totnes in south Devon as the Dart Valley Railway. This former GWR branch line had been closed by British Railways in 1962, although the passenger service had disappeared in 1958. The railway was only the fifth heritage railway in the country to be reopened and, though volunteers were involved, the owning company had shareholders and was run as a commercial undertaking. The author was one of those e...

Ever wondered what it was like to run a fledgling heritage railway? Former General Manager of the North Yorkshire Moors Railway Bernard Warr lifts the veil on the ups and downs of running a private railway line in the 1970s. From working as a volunteer to taking on the most senior management role, all the behind the scenes ctivity is here. That the line ran at all was down to the hard work of a few dozen dedicated volunteers, all of whom had views on how it should be done and who were not ...