OK well I'll stop teasing you all - it's from the 1st June, 1952.
What is doubly amazing to me is that this dense cobweb of rural bus service operated in addition to a full set of branch railway lines...
Well, perhaps it shouldn't be - by 1952 the operators were just about able to get enough buses to carry all the people who wanted to use them instead of trains. So all those trains quickly emptied until ... well, you know what came next.
As Dr Beeching himself said in 1965: "
The position is this. The railways have been displaced as the main providers of public transport in the rural areas by buses, so that virtually all rural train services have become highly uneconomic. Meanwhile, private transport has grown so much that more bus services are also ceasing to pay, and the problem of supporting uneconomic services with good ones is becoming increasingly difficult. Further growth of car ownership is making this position steadily worse. Therefore, although there are fewer people who have to depend on public transport in any one place, some people always will, and there are more and more places which even buses cannot serve economically, let alone trains."
Already!
