The West Midlands: A working museum of buses

The South Staffordshire and northern side of the West Midlands has in recent and not too distant times been a bit of a hot spot for endangered bus types with the fine North Birmingham fleet favouring the Atlantean, National Express's West Midland Buses retaining a large fleet of MCW Metrobuses, Warstones Green Bus the Leyland Leopard and Choice of Willenhall the Leyland National Mk1. Sadly pretty well all of this is now more or less history as even the till recently ubiquitous defiantly reliable Metrobuses are quickly running out of time. Apart from the North Birmingham fleet from not very distant Sutton Coldfield, Walsall was a pretty good place to find these now rare buses hard at work like this former London Buses Leyland National seen in the Nineties. This is quite an interesting twist really when one remembers how before Deregulation in the Eighties Birmingham especially was dominated by the blue and cream West Midlands PTA fleet excluding not just the Independents but even a lot of NBC activity.