The McKindless bus company started off as a small operation of a few buses, a lorry and two coaches in 1987, and traded under the name of Chartered Coaches. Its aim was to provide school contracts and private hires, but it quickly moved into local bus operation, spurred on by the problems suffered by its larger neighbour Central Scottish. The company would sell its services to Kelvin Central Buses in 1992, but restart again on a larger scale. The company ceased operation of its services ab...

Local bus and tram services in Glasgow were traditionally operated by the Corporation Transport Department, which had a monopoly in the city limits from 1930 onwards. This meant buses of the Scottish Bus Group and others could not pick up passengers once they passed the city boundary, although passengers could be set down. As the city expanded, this agreement only covered the boundaries up to 1938, meaning that any development built after this had to be shared with buses of the Scottish Bu...

This book continues the story of the erstwhile Western SMT company. Stagecoach West Scotland operates in west central and south-west Scotland, in an area bounded by Greenock and Braehead to the north, Hamilton to the east, Carlisle to the south and the Isle of Arran to the west. Frequent express services also reach Glasgow from throughout Ayrshire. Stagecoach West Scotland has operated under various brands; Stagecoach Western is the prevalent brand and is used for the vast majority of bus ...

The Scottish Bus Group decided to bring all of its express coaches, London services and coach tours under the umbrella of Scottish Citylink Coaches. This was to raise standards and use a fleet of luxury coaches to work a unified network. This would raise awareness and unleash a fleet of coaches all in the same livery, echoing what National Express had already created in England. Packed with a wealth of previously unpublished photographs from popular Scottish bus author David Devoy, this bo...

Strathtay Scottish was a product of the state-owned Scottish Bus Group’s attempts to prepare for deregulation and possible privatisation in the mid-1980s. It combined a part of Midland Scottish, based around Perthshire, with a part of Northern Scottish based in Dundee and Angus. The Strathtay management tried to buy the company during the privatisation of the Scottish Bus Group, but was ultimately unsuccessful. The winner was the Yorkshire Traction Company based in Barnsley, and this was i...

McGill’s Bus Services is a bus operator based in west central Scotland, with its headquarters situated in Greenock, Inverclyde. The present company was founded in July 2001, restoring the name of a previous operator that had existed between 1933 and 1997. The company has grown from an initial fleet of thirty-three vehicles to operate a network of routes covering much of Inverclyde, East Renfrewshire, North Lanarkshire, Glasgow city and North Ayrshire. A second depot in Barrhead was opened ...

As with everything, the coach industry has changed beyond all recognition over the last few decades. In the past, an operator would purchase a coach and run it for many years to get back their initial investment. More often than not, lightweight chassis were purchased because of the lower purchase price, and these could be changed every few years, keeping a modern look to the fleet. It was always more important in the coach industry to have the latest style. Things began to change in the 1...

Long before Stagecoach, Arriva or First Bus, Ayrshire Independents fought it out with Western SMT on the local and long-distance routes within the county. Ayrshire was unusual in the fact that many small bus operators formed themselves into associations to compete against a much larger company. They not only survived, but prospered for the best part of eighty years. This book shows many of these operators from the 1960s through till the 1990s and looks back at a way of life that has change...

Western SMT was formed in 1932, when the Scottish General Transport Company (which operated buses in Renfrewshire and Ayrshire) merged with Midland Bus Services, which operated from the south-west of Glasgow as far as Ayr, Stranraer and Dumfries. From 1949 to 1991 Western SMT was state-owned, first as part of the British Transport Commission and then as part of the Scottish Bus Group. In the run-up to deregulation the company was split into two with the northern half of its operations tran...

Scottish Motor Traction, or SMT, was originally founded in Edinburgh in 1905. In 1932, Central SMT was founded from a network of services that had been controlled by the London, Midland & Scottish Railway which radiated out from Glasgow into Lanarkshire, and from the services of two further major Lanarkshire bus operators. Nationalised in 1948, Central SMT would become part of the Scottish Bus Group until it was broken up in 1985 under deregulation, becoming Central Scottish Omnibuses. The...

Dumfries and Galloway – the historic counties of Dumfriesshire, the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright and Wigtownshire – is a largely rural area of south-west Scotland. The main operator in the area since the 1950s was the nationalised Western SMT company but a few independents held out and continued to run stage services alongside their coaches. Independent operations, however, were on a small scale. Deregulation in October 1986 allowed many more independent operators to register routes in the a...

Arriva came to have a presence in Scotland as a result of several purchases and mergers, with a management buyout of Clydeside Scottish eventually leading to that company becoming a part of the giant Arriva group. All subsidiary companies of the group were forced to adopt Arriva’s Aquamarine and Cotswold Cream livery, along with the Arriva fleet name; this was coupled with a region-specific strapline of ‘Arriva serving …’ The Scottish operations were detached from the other regions, and th...