Selection of Stories from Cental

And It's Complicated

The Scottish Motor Traction Company saw the light of day in Edinburgh in 1905. It continued to trade as SMT for most of its life; in later years it was known as Eastern Scottish.

In 1928 SMT was purchased by the LMS and LNER railway companies. Who owned what and who bought whom is something of a tangled web but the detail is unimportant, fbb is interested in the consequences!

Meanwhile in 1926 the Glasgow General Omnibus and Motor Services company had been incorporated with links to the London General operation. It traded as Glasgow Omnibus Company (GOC)  ...

... but did not operate buses locally in Glasgow! It ran buses to Lanarkshire (south east from Glasgow) and along the north bank of the Clyde into Dunbartonshire**.

** Quirky Note : It is DuNbartonshire; but the town is DuMbarton.

In 1930 GOC as purchased by LMS! Also in 1930, the LMS was very busy and snaffled up Stewart and Mcdonald of Carluke ...

And J W Torrance of Hamilton. The vehicle below was captioned as a Torrance motor but is clearly now in the SMT fold.

In 1932 these three, plus some smaller "independents" were rolled up into the Central SMT company. At the same time, the Lanarkshire Traction Company of Motherwell was sucked up. It had started operating trams to cover what we would now call inter-urban routes. Destinations included Larkhall ...

... Blantyre ...

... Wishaw and Newmains.

Here is a tram at Motherwell:-

The company also ran buses.

Other companies that joined in with the omnibological fun were; Chieftain ...

... and Baillies of Dumbarton.

Central S M T became the largest and the most profitable of the Scottish railway-owned bus companies.

fbb perhaps should have said that, also in 1930, S M T merged/took over the vast Alexander's bus company with members of the Alexander family joining the board of SMT.

So from 1929/1930 the majority of buses in Scotland were operated by companies owned by two of the largest railway companies in the UK.

When the railways were nationalised in 1948, it was inevitable that the Scottish bus companies should have become state controlled, which happened in 1949. 

It is also worth noting, in passing, that Western S M T began as an operating offshoot from Central!

At first Central traded as Central S M T Co Ltd ...

... but later became just Central.

And A Major Re-Brand

In 1978 the company labels were changed to use the original geographical names plus a saltire flag symbol and the word "Scottish".

Original fleet colours were retained so the identity of the constituent companies remained obvious. This was a much better idea that the National Bus Company in England and Wales where you could have any fleet colour you wanted as long as it was flea green or floppy red. OK, some held out for a while for blue, but most  blues lost their chosen colour in the end.

The national nomenclature was refined as a prelude to privatisation.

Central Scottish

Clydeside Scottish

Eastern Scottish

Fife Scottish

Highland Scottish

Kelvin Scottish

Lowland Scottish

Midland Scottish

Northern Scottish

Strathtay Scottish

Western Scottish

fbb will add a snippet to a later blog to remind his readers of who won what as a result of privatisation; but two oddities ensued early days. Clydeside was merged back into Western but then rapidly demerged and they were sold as two separate companies.

Central and Kelvin did merge and became Kelvin Central! Such originality in the choice of a name is only possible with the consummate skill of the bus industry management!

And It's Colourful

Kelvin Scottish developed a rather striking livery using the former Alexander Midland blue plus a second lighter blue with yellow embellishments.

In theory this would be the same on all buses!

Central Scottish retained the traditional red ...

... but added a varied selection of stripes and slopes in the cream of old. But things had not progressed much by the time the merger with Kelvin came along.

So plan A was to slap yellow fronts on the Central red. It looked awful ...

... no matter what body style was soi adorned!

fbb would guess that there was heated debate at Kelvin Central HQ as to what to do. In the end the decision was made (possibly on cost grounds) to go for Central red all round. The fleet name was added in often invisible gold.

The along came a KCB logo.

Usually, you could read the full name.

Almost. Then came a jackpot idea. Lets have a name in red on cream that people can read. Let's have a name that sounds trendy and is short thus easy to remember.

Let's call ourselves ...

... "Network"! Ot you could ger cream on red.

Photos suggest that it was a brighter redder red than the original. It might just have been cleaner!

But even that was not to last because KCB was bought by First Bus who called it "First Kelvin" at first, thus obliterating the carefully conserved memories of Central.

But that didn't last long either.

Barbie was coming!

 The tale continues on  Wednesday .

 Next First Bus snippet blog : Tues 4 Mar