The MHD Partnership has turned its attention to Western Scottish, imagining that it remained independent after privatisation in the 1990s and that it required a good new image for the fashions of the 2010s
IDENTITY PARADE
If one word encapsulates the livery style of the company known latterly as Western Scottish, it is ‘traditional’. Gold leaf Western fleetnames — shaded block capitals on double-deckers, a scroll typeface on single-deckers — were unchanged from 1934 until the Scottish Bus Group introduced black and blue corporate fleetnames in 1978. The company had been Western SMT since 1932 and only became Western Scottish in 1985 when SBG restructured from seven to 11 regional subsidiaries, leaving a smaller Western with routes in Ayrshire and Dumfries & Galloway.
From 1934 to 1940, its livery was black and white, but postwar this was confined to coaches; everything else was red and cream. Coaches gained two-tone grey in the 1980s in addition to black and white, and later variations brought combinations of black, white, grey and red, and a return to a traditional style of fleetname with block capital letters in a serif font.
Western was the last SBG subsidiary to be privatised, sold to its manag…
