There’s a buzz of energy around Darren Roe, MD of Stagecoach East, which contrasts sharply with many of the more laconic bus company managers I’ve met. In fact ‘buzz’ may be an understatement; he’s quite exhausting to listen to, and I mean that as a compliment. It was evident when I heard him talk at […]
2025 marks 100 years of the Edwards family’s involvement in bus and coach operations. It all started in March 1925 with the granting of a licence for a bus service from their home village of Beddau to Pontypridd. Fast forwarding through several generations and business models brings us to Llantrisant based Edwards Coaches led by […]
In 1998, David Reeves and Gerald Henderson, both then employees of Staffordshire Ambulance Service, commenced a minibus operation from the former Longton Bus Station in the Potteries. The business grew quickly with David moving in to a full-time role as a roller-coaster of sales and acquisitions saw expansion into Crewe and the West Midlands while […]
In his fourth lavish volume on Midland Red (the trading name of the Birmingham and Midland Motor Omnibus Company – BMMO), Ashley Wakelin poses the question as to whether Midland Red’s activities were evolutionary or revolutionary but leaves the reader to make up their own mind on the evidence provided. This includes the recollections of […]
Keith Jenkinson has documented the ultimate demise of the UK’s life expired buses for many years, focussing particularly on those in Yorkshire where just one road in Barnsley once housed some 15 companies engaged in the scrap business. Nowadays, there is a much wider geographical spread and most vehicles meet their end in modern facilities […]
It is a big year for Iveco Bus with triple celebrations marking 50 years of the Iveco brand, 100 years of the Annonay city bus factory in France and 130 years of its biggest bus plant, Vysoké Mýto, in the Czech Republic. To celebrate this and witness the opening of the new Prototype and Testing […]
Following his treatise on Duple and its long running Dominant product, Howard Berry turns his attention to the final years of Duple coach production including the Laser, looking much like an evolved Dominant and the squarer high specification Caribbean, both of which ran to .2 versions. The squarer styling continued to the 300 series and […]
Following on from his Plaxton trilogy, Howard Berry has turned his attention to the UK’s other leading builder of coach bodies in the mid 20th Century, Duple and its long running Dominant product. Launched in 1972 in response to Plaxton’s Panorama Elite, it would be refreshed twice during production producing the Dominant II and IV. […]
When we road tested Yutong’s TCe12 electric coach – the first battery coach in the UK – we were in praise of so much that it is, and critical of what it isn’t. TCe12 is a competent inter-urban luxury people carrier – a coach, for sure, but in a very similar niche to Irizar’s i4, […]
