POOLING Through the Years

18th March 1955, Page 187

18th March 1955

Page 187

Page 188

Page 187, 18th March 1955 — POOLING Through the Years

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By C. S. Dunbar, M.Inst.T.

London Gave a Lead in : Part Played by Railways:. Existing Agreements Derived from Tram Days

N the year 1904-5, only 241 licences were issued for mechanically propelled buses in the Metropolitan Police Area as against 3,484 for horsed-buses. There may actuly have been considerably fewer than 241 motorbuses in gular use, as many experiments were being carried out, id, when the ownership of vehicles changed--as it equently did then—a new licence was issued. Thus, when lie Commercial Motor was launched the motorbus was of ) great moment in the sphere of London transport, pecially when contrasted with the electric tram for which 124 licences were issued in that period. But the augury was ere, and each successive year saw a substantial increase the number of motorbuses.

The advent of the motorbus, and its rapid increase in irnbers from 1905 onwards, disrupted one of the most tmplete systems of co-ordination between independent :oprietors that has ever been devised—the famous London Limes." This system was the small owners' answer to the ireat of monopoly when the wealthy London General irinibus Co. came into being. and in time, the General !came a member of some of the associations and so partipaled in their routes.

Each association such as the Atlas and Waterloo. the logs Cross and Barnsbury and the Camden Town, etc.), btaiaed a monopoly of a route or group of routes by means ell known to older busmen. Each association emploed a )ad director, who, in turn, employed all the conductors, mekeepers and cashiers, the owners supplying the vehicles. orses and drivers. All receipts were pooled and shared. When some association members began to operate motoruses, the allocation of " times" was upset because of the iffering speeds and carrying capacities of the two types of chicle, and the position was further complicated by the dvent of new companies. Thomas Tilling, one of the largest orsed-bus proprietors, terminated their membership of the ,flas and Waterloo Association on December 15, 1906, and

then the General acquired the wholly motorized fleet of the ranguard, and the largely mechanized fleet of the London ,oad Car Co., on July 1, 1908, the preponderance of motoruses in the hands of one company was so great that the ssociations ceased to have any significance.

A sign of the times was the London Passenger Transport :onference of 1907, which brought about an agreement etween the Metropolitan Railway, the underground railway ompanies. the London United trams, and the motorbus ,perators, to put bus. tram and undereyound fares on the trne basis. As the General gradually changed over to motorbuses they handed some of the outer suburban horsed-bus routes to Thomas Tilling, and the friendly relations between the two companies led to the adoption on April 2, 1914, of a pooling arrangement. which definitely assured Tillings of a permanent place in London. transport. Other agreements followed in 1922 and 1923. and Tillings were finally established as being entitled to 5 per cent, of the London bus flea

In 1912, the L.G.O. came under the control of the Underground, and a year later an agreement was made with the British Electric Traction group defining the routes which the latter's subsidiary. British Automobile Traction, might operate in London. On January 1, 1914, a similar 4n-cement was made with the National Steam Car Co., limiting their operations and guaranteeing their receipts.

Birth of the Common Fund

Meanwhile, in 1912 and 1913, the London Suburban Traction Co., in which the B.E.T. and Underground were jointly interested, took over the three company tramways. These developments led to the Common Fund, which came into existence on January 1. 1915. It pooled the net revenues of the Underground and General and divided them in agreed proportions which were varied from time to time (in 1931 the L.G.O. were receiving 24.40 per cent.).

The Common Fund must not be confused with the London Pool, which related only to buses and embodied the working arrangements between the General, Tilling. National and others. In can he said that from the London Pool and the Common Fund eventually came the London Passenger Transport Board.

The position in the provinces was very different, On the one hand, there were the industrial areas where, by 1905, the electric tram was well established and where in most places people lived near to their work, but on the other, there were the purely rural areas where the carrier's cart and the station fly were good enough.

Such motorbuses as there were outside London in 1905 were usually isolated units engaged in railway feeder services. The Great Western Railway and the North-Eastern started such services in 1903, the Great Eastern and Great North of Scotland in 1904, the London and South-Western, London and North-Western and Midland in 1905, and the Cambrian in 1906.

The first private ventures, such as the Sussex Motor Road Car Co., and the Vale of Llangollen Bus and Garage Co., were also designed as railway feeders. This tendency remained for many years. and co-operation between provincial motorbus owners came much later than in London.

Co-operation had, however, begun at an early date with trams, and this is of importance because many of the interworking agreements in existence today derive from tramway c45 operation. The extensive mileage of tramways in south and east Lancashire, in two main groups, led naturally to through-running agreements. Ignoring the outright leasing of small municipal systems to large operators, the first through-running agreements were probably those made in 1900 between Blackburn and Darwen and Bolton and Farnworth.

Farnworth soon ceased to be an operator. hut the joint service between Blackburn and Darwen is still working. Early, too, came the entry of Salford trams into Manchester, followed by the Stockport and Hyde agreement of 1903, and others in the same area. Such motorbuses as ran in south Lancashire before 1927 were in almost all cases simply feeders to the trams, but in that year, the councils of Manchester, Salford. Bury, Rochdale, Oldham, Ashtonunder-Lyne, Heywood, Stockport and Bolton, together with the S.H.M.D. Joint Board and Lancashire United, embarked on a joint scheme for express services running from points 10 or 12 miles out of Manchester to corresponding points on the other side of the city.

Commissioners Short-sighted

With an incredible lack of foresight, one of the first things the Traffic Commissioners did when they came to power in 1931 was to break up this organization, but the joint operation of bus routes replacing former tram routes in Lancashire has continued and been considerably extended. Valuable connections arc afforded by such services as those to Liverpool from Salford and from 'Wigan. the former being a pool with five members and the latter with four.

The Bury-Rawtenstall routes also involve a pool of four operators. There are many similar agreements throughout the country where the receipts on one or more routes are shared among a number of operators and, in addition, there must be hundreds of routes where the operators do not pool receipts but work on a mutually agreed time-table and accept one another's returns.

Such arrangements have led in many cases to amalgamation, and the most outstanding case is that of the Potteries. The chaotic situation there in the early 1920s almost surpassed credibility, and it was a great step forward when, in January, 1924, most of the independent operators came together in the Associated North Staffs Motor Bus Proprietors, instituted interchangeable weekly and return tickets, and appointed joint inspectors. In September, 1929, the further step of forming Associated Bus Companies, Ltd., was taken for the purpose of buying the undertakings of members wishing to sell out.

After 1930, the Association and the Potteries Motor Traction Co., issued joint time-tables and made their returns and weekly tickets inter-available. The logical conclusion came in 1944 in the merger of the Association in the P.M.T.. which also acquired most of the remaining local independents in 1951-2.

A development which, in course of time. may possibly have the same effect, is to be seen in the area pools which have been established at Brighton, Exeter, Hull, Luton, Plymouth, Portsmouth and Southend. In these cases, the corporations concerned andone or more companies serving the surrounding country have agreed to operate the services within a defined area substantially as one undertaking, working car-mileage and sharing profits or losses in agreed proportions.

Before any of these pools as set up, a rather different type of pool was devised between the railway companies and the corporations of Sheffield, Halifax, Huddersfield and Todmorden. In these cases the railways, instead of using the powers conferred on them by their Acts of 1928, contented themselves with buying certain routes or portions of routes and entrusting the management to the corporations.

The railways followed a similar plan in those districts w here the bulk of the services were provided by one wellestablished company which they either bought outright (as in the case of Crosville and Hcbble) or in which they acquired a substantial interest. Working agreements with private companies ante-dated the acquisition of road powers by the railways. as, for instance, the agreement defining c46 routes made by the G.W.R. with Devon Motor Transport, Cornwall Motor Transport, and Crosvillc. After 1929 the railways divested themselves of their road passenger services. I referred earlier to joint working of bus services developing out of through-running tram agreements. The West Midlands has illustrated both this and an entirely opposite tendency. On October 3, 1914, by agreement with the Midland Red, Birmingham Corporation secured a monopoly of services within the city and protected them by what was for those days, a high fare. Some through tram services were the only exception and the bus services now. worked in succession to these are still the only exceptions. Much the same is true of other municipal operators in the area.

The end of the 1914-18 war unloosed a flood of road operators in London and other parts of the country. It had been thought that the "Thirty Mile Agreement of 1921 between the London Pool and the Motor Hirers' Association would protect the former from new incursions in return for an undertaking not to operate beyond an area roughly co-terminous with the present London Transport area, but many of the newcomers engaged in stage work (particularly after 1922) and hundreds more in coach operation.

It would take too long to detail the gradual absorption of the independent stage operators into the L.G.0., and later the L.P.T.B., and, in any case, such co-ordination was produced by statutory regulation and, later, by compulsory acquisition. The coaching fraternity was different, and divided itself into two classes—those who tended to work regular routes, and the free-lances. Among the former was Turnham and Co., Ltd., who in 1919 began services to the south coast at ranch the same time as Southdown began running to London. During that year, the two companies agreed to make their London-Brighton returns inter-available. In the following year, on the initiative of Mr. Shirley James, of Pickfords, a pool was established under the name of London and Coastal Motor Ser. ices. The principal operators of services between London and the coast joined in and their receipts, after the deduction of working expenses. were pooled and divided on the basis of mileage worked. In the autumn of 1921 Mr. L. H. Turnham, of Turnham and Co., became manager of the pool, which survived until 1925. It was replaced, so far as the " federated " companies were concerned, by London Coastal Coaches, which provided a joint terminal and control of agencies over a wide area.

Coach Operators Slow

Coach owners were somewhat slow in establishing pooling as a permanent feature, but a start was made in 1929, when four companies began joint operation of a service between Newcastle and Liverpool, This, known as the Limited Stop or Northern Pool Service, was joined in 1932 and 1934 by two other operators and expanded to include services between Newcastle and Leeds and Coventry.

The Yorkshire Services Pool, started in February. 1930. ith three participants. was later increased to five, and now embraces services between the principal places in Yorkshire and Birmingham and London. The Yorkshire-Blackpool Pool, dating from 1935, originally included eight operators, but three of these have been absorbed into Ribble. Ribble is also concerned jointly in a number of other long-distance services, ind was the prime mover in the establishment in 1934 of Blackpool Omnibus Stations, Ltd., in which seven operators are shareholders.

In the 5outh, important developments in 1932 were pooling between Greyhound and Royal Blue (Elliott Bros.), on the London-Bristol-Weston service, and between East Kent, Maidstone, Southdown and Royal Blue on the MargateBournemouth service.

A still more important event was the establishment. on July 1, 1934, of Associated Motorways, which combined many of the express services of the Midland Red, Black and White (itself the joint property of the Midland, Oxford and Bristol companies), Royal Blue (subsequently absorbed into Southern and Western National), Greyhound (as a Bristol subsidiary), Red and White and United Counties. This co-operative undertaking has been outstanding in the improved services it has enabled its constituents to give by joint action and the traffic it has been able to attract.