REVIEWS
Title: Lancashire United — The Fleet 1900-1981
Author: Richard Allen, Michael Eyre & Peter Greaves
Publisher: Greater Manchester Transport Society
ISBN: 978-0-946022-04-5
Specification: 255mm x 180mm, 240pp, hardback
Price: £25
Lancashire United Transport was highly unusual, a large regional bus company independent of the big groups.
One of those groups, BET, held a minority but influential shareholding. It also owned Ribble, which had ambitions to expand into the parts of south Lancashire that LUT developed as its own territory and was far from happy that LUT was allowed to share operation of the X60/X70 route between Manchester and Blackpool with Ribble and North Western Road Car.
LUT was a master of joint operation, by the 1930s sharing over half of its services with 14 company and municipal operators.
Its wealthy and well-connected owners rebuffed takeover bids from Crosville and the London Midland & Scottish Railway, maintaining its independence until a 1971 agreement with Selnec PTE gave the PTE — from 1974 renamed Greater Manchester and covering most of the areas that LUT served — the unilateral right to acquire the company at the end of 1975. LUT was integrated into the PTE in April 1981.
