Hooptedoodle #116 – not quite a collection – someone else’s hobby

This is a modern photo of a preserved Liverpool Corporation bus from the
1950s - hence the modern car and the lack of flat caps on the passengers

I recently surprised myself by treating myself to some lovely little 1/76 (HO) scale buses. This is an odd thing to do – I was never a true bus enthusiast – at least not on my own behalf. My cousin, who was the same age as me, just lived and breathed buses from about age 7 onwards. He had all the Ian Allan books, and as a boy I spent many long days with him at exotic places like Preston bus depot, underlining the numbers of the vehicles we spotted in his books.

Simply by osmosis and exposure to his enthusiasm, I grew up knowing all sorts of nerdy things about specialist coachbuilders, and odd Liverpool Corporation buses which had aluminium bodies, built by Crossley on AEC chassis…

You get the idea. Cousin Dave and I even assembled a small fleet of Dinky Toy buses, but the available selection in those days was very poor – Dinky made one generic double-decker which might have been a Leyland (we did have one, rare pre-war Dinky casting, and that seemed to be a Guy), and it was available in badly-sprayed green and cream or badly-sprayed red and cream.

Our little fleet disappeared into the toy boxes of younger relatives ages ago, but for years I kept an eye open sufficiently to be casually aware that the only HO scale buses I ever saw in UK shops were red London Transport Routemasters – usually in a twin-pack with an out-of-scale London taxi for the tourist market.

My cousin died a good few years ago, so my model bus ogling days are long gone, but recently – when I was looking for old photos of the Crosville buses to Chester in the 1950s – for this blog, in fact – I accidentally discovered what is on the market for collectors now. Wow. Very largely because I couldn’t help thinking how Dave would have loved them, I spent a couple of days gazing at all sorts of provincial exotica on the Internet, and eventually bought a few, with the very firm resolve that this would not be the beginning of yet another unofficial collection. I have restricted myself to buses that I used to see as a kid in Liverpool area – this is what real buses will always look like for me, in the same way as the cigarette cards of childhood are how real footballers look. Inculcation – you can’t beat it.

I still have one coming in the mail – that is a 1950s Leyland single-decker in the colours of Ribble, such as I used to see on rare visits to the Lake District. The ones that have arrived thus far are set out here; welcome to the land of the Not-Quite Bus Nerd.

These weren't too common in Liverpool - Ribble used to run services between
Liverpool and towns in Darkest Lancashire. We used to visit the big Ribble
depot in Skelhorne Street - behind Lime Street railway station - and saw
a great many Leylands like this (the destination town of Leyland is where the chassis
were made)

Early 1950s Crosville-owned Bristol bus, route 116 from Huyton to Liverpool Pier Head.
You could get on a Crosville bus to travel between stops within the city of Liverpool,
but the services were primarily to places outside the city, and the fares were a little dearer than
the "Corpy" buses

The single decker Crosville service between Liverpool Pier Head and Caernarfon
ran through the Mersey Tunnel, and was the best way to get to Rhyl and the
other North Wales resorts. On a Tuesday, most of the women in Flintshire
seemed to come on this bus to visit Liverpool market 

This is the business - the real deal from the early 1950s - an AEC Regent III
in Liverpool Corporation Passenger Transport livery, on route to Penny Lane.
Buses will always look like this to me. My cousin lived at my Nan's house,
in Briardale Road, which runs into Penny Lane - we knew the
Wavertree/Smithdown Road area served by this route very well.
Goodness me - I can stare at this for hours.