Late 1930s GWR (or Wiltshire region) buses

[george stein]

Writing from the USA.  Clearly buses are an important subset of UK OO scale railways.  And, a quick look at on-line catalogs or e-bay shows that there is, to USA eyes used to Greyhound & Continental only, a staggering diversity of buses & liveries.  So, for my late 1930s GWR layout set in Wiltshire, can someone suggest the appropriate OO buses I should search for on e-bay or elsewhere.  I believe the old "Merit" GWR bus kit was long out of service by the late 1930s.  Thank you.

[Merfyn Jones]

Hello George.

If I can help a bit with firstly the Merit/Peco Maudslay bus.  These were built for the GWR between 1926 & 29, but were disposed of with the routes they operated by 1932, to the larger companies who had railway connections.  In your area these were City of Oxford, Thames Valleyand Bristol Omnibus. How long they will have operated them I do not know, but those in my part of the world only lasted till the mid 30s.

In Wiltshire, one of the major operators was Wilts and Dorset, although they don't seem to have had any ex GWR routes.  I think you may have to look closer at the area you are modeling for who ran the buses there. Unfortunatley not many bus kits, and few ready made models are available from that period. The only one comes to mind is the EFE Leyland TD1 which covers use from 1929 to early 1950s.

Merf.

[chrisf]

Funnily enough, I was reading about this the other day. The GWR ran its own buses from 1903, chiefly as feeder services connecting with its trains. This is an unfamiliar concept today when so many bus companies also run train services! By the mid 20s the railway companies had doubts as to whether they actually had legal powers to run buses. In the 1927/28 session of Parliament each of the Big Four applied successfully for powers to operate road vehicles, one of the reasons given being to secure a full measure of co-ordination between road and rail transport.

 

What actually happened, and this may not have been the original intention, was that from 1929 the railway companies invested in new bus companies and nominated one or more of their Directors to the board. There was already a National Bus Company and this spawned Western National, which had something of a presence in Wilts although more normally associated with Devon and Cornwall. Other bus companies in which the GWR invested were Devon General, Western Welsh and Crosville. All bus services run under the GWR label were handed over to one or other of the companies in which they had invested.

 

Wilts and Dorset was one of the BET [british Electric Traction] companies that sold out to the British Transport Commission in 1950 in advance of the nationalisation that never came until the [second] National Bus Company was formed in 1968. Others in this group were Red and White, which had a considerable presence in Gloucestershire and South Wales, and its subsidiary United Welsh.

 

Chris