PAST & PRESENT
The multi-coloured municipal buses of Halifax and the Calder Valley went through some rapid changes of ownership in the early 1970s in a burst of expansion that also added variety to this Yorkshire fleet
When Iain MacGregor visited Halifax in September 1972, its municipal bus undertaking was in a state of short-lived transformation.
This was one of the four in Yorkshire in which British Rail had a direct interest until its shareholding passed in 1969 to Amalgamated Passenger Transport, a non-operating subsidiary of the National Bus Company. The Halifax fleet fell into two parts, one owned wholly by the corporation and identifiable on buses which carried the town’s coat of arms, the other jointly with NBC as the Halifax Joint Omnibus Committee with no symbols of heraldry.
The JOC fleet grew to 135 vehicles during 1971 and changed its name to Calderdale JOC, taking over Hebble Motor Services’ bus operations from NBC in February that year and seven months later the 38-vehicle jointly owned municipal undertaking in Todmorden, the Yorkshire town that until 1888 was partly in Lancashire.
These changes were but a stepping stone to further upheaval in April 1974, when local government reo…
