PAST & PRESENT
For more than half a century, buses in one of England’s premier cathedral cities were run in partnership with the local authority in an arrangement that replaced the last electric ones with motorbuses. Growing numbers today are electric and the council still has great influence on the service.
For 52 years from April 1934, bus services in York were provided by a joint committee of York Corporation (City Council from 1974) and the West Yorkshire Road Car Company, which from 1948 was a stateowned undertaking.
Although they wore West Yorkshire’s Tilling red and cream livery and were standard types in the company’s fleet, their fleetnumbers had aY prefix and the fleetname was York-West Yorkshire.
Under this arrangement, the corporation’s blue and cream electric trams, trolleybuses and motorbuses were taken over and company buses replaced the trams and trolleybuses 18 months later in 1935. The National Bus Company’s poppy red and white replaced Tilling red after the corporate livery was introduced in 1972 and the fleetname (with NBC double-N logo) was shortened to York from around 1980. Four-digit fleetnumbers replaced the letter prefixes in 1971, with the York fleet numbered in the 3000s.
