Most bus enthusiasts of a certain age will remember M.A.P a kind of Doctor Beeching knife job on all the NBC bus services that were not viable. Rural East Anglia and Lincolnshire would have been rich pickings for the red pen but at least it found employment for a former Trent MCW bodied Leyland Atlanteen 67 ACH seen in Newark. I'm not sure if it was used as a mobile office or just display and information unit. One good thing about MAP, they didn't rip up all the roads the empty buses once used too, but on the other hand it might have been a bit of blessing for our congested towns.
The big difference between Beeching and MAP is that internal politics didn't impact MAP in anything like the way it did the railway during the Beeching Cuts (and post-Beeching, for that matter). Everyone knows a railway line which closed despite being more viable than some of the survivors, but which had fallen foul of Inter-Regional politics within BR; MAP didn't have that sort of impact on NBC's subsidiaries, for all it took out a lot of routes.
ReplyDeleteI think it's fair to say that without MAP (or VNP as it was when started by Midland Red), neither Lincolnshire Road Car nor Midland Red would have survived to see deregulation, and Midland Red quite possibly wouldn't even have survived to be split up.
I don't think we ever realised just how parlous the finances of these companies were, with LRC teetering on bankruptcy throughout the 1970s and MROC rapidly joining them after BMMO's loss of the profitable Black Country work in 1973.
We all bemoan the sell out to the THC of BET's assets but in reality they got out at the right time. As with the railways it's a shame politicians in this country don't recognise the the social and environmental value of public transport.
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