Routes that ran deep into rural Wharfedale

One of the pictures provided by The Bus Archive shows West Yorkshire SMA1, an ECW-bodied Bristol SUL4A, splashing through floodwater in Kilnsey on a journey from Skipton to Kettlewell and Buckden.

The West Yorkshire Road Car Company disappeared in the aftermath of the privatisation and deregulation revolution of the late 1980s.

Bought from the National Bus Company (NBC) by managers led by the managing director of East Yorkshire, it was broken up and sold on. The part that reached out into Skipton has become Transdev’s The Keighley Bus Company, but others provide what is left of the routes that stretched north into Upper Wharfedale and Wensleydale.

Stuart Emmett has compiled this attractive tribute to that lost world of bus operation for this, the eighth volume in the publisher’s Britain’s Buses series of picture albums, showing scenes from the 1950s to 1970s in colour and black and white photographs. There are far more black and whites and these are the best of these illustrations.