Title: National Express Coaches
Author: Keith A. Jenkinson
Publisher: Amberley Publishing
ISBN: 978-1-4456-7877-1
Specification: 235mm x 165mm, 96pp, softback
Price: £14.99
If the title of this book suggests cover-to-cover depictions of standard coaches in a uniform white livery, think again.
In telling the 45-year story of what initially was the National coach brand, Keith Jenkinson provides photographic proof that by no means every coach ever was just white, and even today’s more standardised operation with Caetano Levantes is leavened by livery variations and the use of other types and makes.
Nor is this just a picture album, Twelveand- a-half pages of solid text tell the story of National Express from inception in 1972 to the present day. It is a story that began with the National Bus Company’s decision to organise and market its subsidiary companies’ multi-coloured but disjointed coaching activities as a single brand, its recently appointed chairman Freddie Wood apparently keen to create a British equivalent of America’s Greyhound Lines on the roads of England and Wales.
Jenkinson tells us that the livery might not have been the now familiar white with red and blue lettering, as consultants engaged to …