Tamworth Garage and the X99

Arriva is celebrating Eighty-Years of it's Tamworth Garage in Aldersgate and as I popped down there last Sunday to see what was going on, I thought today I ought to post a proper red Tamworth bus from those much missed Midland Red days. Tamworth's most important run was most of the duties which it also shared with Coalville on the hourly two-hour-forty-five-minute long X99 Service from Birmingham to Nottingham, also taking in Sutton Coldfield, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Castle Donnington and Long Eaton. Not surprisingly there were at least half a dozen comfortable front-line red and black painted dual-purpose machines on the allocation at TH and in 1963 49 seater LS18A Willowbrook Leyland Leopards arrived at both garages to replace smaller BMMO S15's, some of which were less than two years old. The first generation of these powerful Leopards did the workings till in 1971 a new generation of these Willowbrook bodied Leopards started to arrive Nos. 6394-6445. Now part of the NBC sadly the company had dropped not only those distinguished black roofs but the dark-red roofed replacement scheme that superseded it from 1967. Notwithstanding brand new all-red 6401 looked just the ticket as it swung out of the Bull Ring Bus Station. The fact that it was a coach as opposed to a bus was displayed by the silver transfers and opposed to the ordinary yellow variety, a subtlety no doubt lost on the general public.