Pleasant reminisces of being a young enthusiast lead our columnist to remember the days when authorities could inconvenience passengers in the name of integration
During a recent short break, I was reminded of the time that I was head chorister of Blackburn Cathedral choir.
Although my home town’s cathedral church does not have the history and grandeur of what is so evident in Salisbury and Wells, the nostalgia button was pressed.
My choirmaster was Thomas Duerden, and he was fascinated by the fact that a boy of 14 had such a keen interest in buses. He encouraged my enthusiasm when, on his return from one of his many tours around the country as a music adjudicator, he would put me to test and I had to stand in front of all the other choristers to face the music, so to speak.
“Who runs the buses in Norwich?” he might ask. “Eastern Counties, Sir,” would be my reply, and my reward, if I got it right, which I always did, was a timetable that he had purchased specially for me. I built up quite a collection.
History’s picture
It’s nice to be an unashamed enthusiast again, this time from an historical perspective, and I am so glad that I have rekindled my interest, having lost it for a while during some difficult times as an operator.
When I carried out my research into the impact of Area Agreements in the bus industry, it was nice that as an enthusiast I could show that the competition authorities may be wrong in their view that agreements and cooperation between operators stifles competition.
History, as I found, painted a different picture, in that market contestability is the key to open competitive activity and that those who have agreed, say, to run a joint service, are still at risk from competitors. What killed competition was statutory intervention by way of road service licensing, not the agreements that operators reached with each other.
Operators may think that the controls exercised by the Traffic Commissioners over adherence to timetables and reliability is something new.
Old integration
I have recently discovered that in the 1920s, the Chief Constable of Bolton employed a Detective Superintendent to monitor services to ensure that buses ran to time and passengers did not make unauthorised journeys.
The difference was that in those days, local authorities used the licensing system, which they administered, to ensure that private operators did not compete with the Corporation’s tramways, and that their vision of how transport should be delivered prevailed.
I also found that ‘integration’ is not as new as people might think. In the 1920s, Bolton Council refused to allow its citizens to travel direct to Darwen by bus and instead, they had to ride on a Corporation tram to the borough boundary at Dunscar, where they then changed onto a privately-owned bus operated by Belford Services to complete the journey to Darwen.
Let’s hope that history does not repeat itself under franchising regimes, and that unsuspecting passengers are not forced to do similarly unpopular things.
It just goes to show that there is more to being an enthusiast than jotting down fleet and chassis numbers.
