The Drawline Group had a large number of redundant former Green Line Coaches and a dire shortage of business at East Lancs Coachbuilders which it also owned so it was decided to create some new service buses for Midland Red North with attractive bodywork styled by Ray Stenning. In 1998 No.1737 an Oswestry bus was seen at Shrewsbury Garage and once bore ECW bodywork with the registration WPH 124Y.
Thank you for this shot. Well proportioned vehicle. I'd forgotten the lively, bright Midland Red North livery!
ReplyDeleteThat knot on the front was something to do with Stevenson's, I think. Can you confirm or expand?
You said in an earlier comment, "Going by my searches visitors seem to very much love Royal Tiger Doyans and Yelloways." Search engines are funny things. It's possible people arrive using these terms because you already have a number of them scattered around your site. Doesn't *necessarilty* mean that people love them!!
But pictures of old Yelloway are always welcomed, IMHO.
The Omnibuses2.0 Blog
The Knot of course is our Heraldic symbol, the Staffordshire Knot and it was used as a motif to marry the combined MRN and Stevenson fleet and was used even on buses based some distance away in Shropshire, Cheshire and even in Wales. The livery originally carried on all these rebodied Tigers was the MRN version of the new Drawline standard with for this company a red and white bus livery. There was a red and yellow variant too to be carried on DP's but even though some of these vehicles had coach seating they strangely missed out. After a while these Tigers like the other MRN buses adopted a version of the traditional all-red BMMO livery and this included a couple of the now red DP's which were given a black top half and another bus which had just the black roof-top. Sadly not only did the company use the wrong darker shade of red it was of very poor quality and the buses quickly grew dull and shabby so once the whole fleet was at last red again they quickly reverted to the previous MRN Drawline standard and got rid of the heavy-handed all-red. However this time they decided to do it differently and they painted the whole fleet in the brighter red and yellow version previously used on all the DP's including double-deckers. Horray! so now at last the East Lancs bodied DP Tigers were wearing the correct red and yellow DP livery but the original situation had been totally reversed as the previously red and white buses now wore the DP's colours too. Confused? I don't know what the public made of it all, I expect they were more concerned whether the bus was running late or not and must have had an opinion or two why the fares kept going up.
ReplyDeleteThanks for clearing the livery issue up. I think : )
ReplyDeleteDidn't know Midland Red North based vehicles in Wales, though they operated them there.
Now of course there can be no livery confusion as all are under the same easily recognisable and quite long-lived Arriva standard.