Great Western Coffee Shop

Just for a bit of fun: Here's a route map of the "Bristol" Omnibus Service. But when?

(https://fosbr.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/old-bus-map.jpg)

1930s?

Later - 1940's I would plump for.

(Adopts best Brucie voice:) Later!


Even later!

Between 1950 and 1957

Zoning in nicely...

I think I remember seeing the occasional Bristol Bus in Evesham for a few years after we moved here from the West Country in 1967, but the map has an older look to it than that.  I'll go for 1955 - that was an excellent year.

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...

We lived in Crewkerne in the 1950s and were reliant on both train and bus. The latter in the main getting us to exotic places such as Yeovil, Lyme Regis and Bridport Harbour (West Bay). The train we also used to Lyme and once the Bridport branch. This was a time before we had a car and with my father in the RAF until 1960 we had no access to a car on a regular basis until then.

The Southern and Western National maps of c1964 show a similar density to Bristol

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!

Presumably by late 1960's many of these villages were down to 4 or 5 journeys a day ? Or did bus companies cross subsidise rural loss making routes with more profitable ones ? Certainly by 1980s some very small places were down to weekly shopper service to nearest town at best  :-[