Phased-out bus business booms
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• Passenger service vehicles phased out by bus passenger transport and city authorities are big business in Barnsley, Yorkshire, where one firm is handling more than 2000 single and double-deckers a year and is forming a larger group with a new sales and viewing depot, an export division and spare parts division. To be known as the Paul Sykes Organisation, bus and coach sales, service exporters and stockists of psv and commercial spares, the company was started just over eight years ago by 28-year-old Barnsley-born former motor mechanic Mr Paul Sykes on an initial capital of £170.
The firm is now booming and is one of the principal purchasers of buses and coaches from PTAs and large and small transport authorities throughout the country. It has now gone into the export market in a big way and 80 per cent of its business consists of sending buses, engines and spare parts to such places as Singapore, Hong Kong, South Africa and Jamaica. Only recently the firm completed an order for 16 single-deck buses for an Australian firm. In the business is Mr Sykes' younger brother Alan and the managing director Mr A. D. Tucker.
Buses are brought in job-lots, PTAs and city undertakings more often than not inviting the firm to tender for the purchase of batches at a time. These are later graded for resale, dismantling for scrap, for spare parts and in particular for the engines.
The bead office of the company is at • Blacker Hill Sidings, Platts Common, Barnsley, but another depot is to be established at nearby Carlton and a super sales and show room on a site in Wakefield Road where building is beginning this month. All the buses sold have full road certificates of fitness and Mr Sykes told CM that a large percentage purchased have many more useful years life in them having been maintained in excellent condition. There has been great demand for the buses not only from the less developed countries — India is a recent purchaser — but from Australia and the Bahamas.
The firm arranges collection of the buses and if necessary uses one of its three towing vehicles with cranes for the operation although nearly all buses are in such excellent condition they are able to be driven to the depot.
Sales of bus engines, particularly Gardner, AEC and Leyland are soaring and the firm also carries a stock of 3000 bus tyres up to Ministry standards. Recently, after a telephone call from Hong Kong Mr Sykes was able to supply 600 urgently required half-shafts for Daimler buses and 60 sets of front and rear axles. The firm crates its engines and other spares and sends its buses largely via the Port of Hull.