NBC's route to the present
Page 78
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AS IT ACCELERATES in the fast lane of politics towards full or partial privatisation, it is worth remembering that the National Bus Company is a fairly recent creation of the transport world. It was formed by the merger of the former British Transport Commission and British Electric Traction companies in 1969 and only three years later did it begin to adopt a unifying identity.
In Bus Operators: 2. NBC Antecedents and Formation (Ian Allan; (E5.95), Stewart Brown has taken a broad, largely pictorial but incisively written look at the histories of the subsidiary companies which formed NBC up to the point when the corporate identity was imposed. The limits of only 128 pages mean that the potted histories must be brief, but there is a wealth of bus history compressed into that area.
An introduction takes the story from 1847, when Thomas Tilling first ran horse buses and the formation of BET in 1895, through the great period of growth after World War One and the influence of railway ownership in the Thirties, to Tilling's takeover by BTC and the first swathe of nationalisation in 1948. Brown updates the story by chronicling not only the formation of NBC, but the events after 1972 as it came to terms with the Passenger Transport Executives and sold its share in the joint bus building business run with Leyland.
There are photographs of many of the wide variety of vehicles run by the companies which help to illustrate the various strands of thought leading eventually to today's greater level of vehicle standardisation. There is a good mix of the one-off unusual vehicles and those very different looking creations of the past which were standard products fot the individual operators. A.L.M.
Ian Allan Ltd, Terminal House, Shepperton, Surrey TVV17 SAS