This latest published selection of retired surgeon John Sinclair’s extensive photograph collection — he estimates that there could be a quarter of a million of them — covers the territory of the erstwhile Alexander (Northern) company, which stretched from the Moray Firth to Dundee and eastern parts of rural Perthshire.
Although the photographs also include vehicles of several independent operators and one showing four Aberdeen Corporation double-deckers, this above all is the story of the Northern company and the vehicles it operated in the 1960s. Sinclair acquired his first 35mm camera a few months after the huge Alexander company was split in three in 1961, ready to record its consequences for posterity as Northern introduced many different applications of its highly distinctive livery of yellow and cream.
Besides the vehicles (he offers pictures of bus backs as well as fronts and sides), about which he imparts an incredible amount of detailed knowledge, he also has studied the services they operated, the duties to which they were allocated, the small rural depots at which many were based and the way that buses provided essential transport in an age before today’s near universal car ownership in country areas.
