Friday, 17 October 2025

An Eastern Counties Ambassador at Norwich


 One of my favourite places for bus photography was Norwich especially as it was a late Bristol Lowdekka stronghold. Also it had an interesting large bus station on a slope with a good sized bus garage attached. One thing I liked about the Tilling Group and firms like Eastern Counties was the way it built attractive bus stations in brick with good facilities and kept them clean and smart even in the normally less proud cost-cutting NBC era. In that respect it often outshone parts of the BET Group like Nortern General which even in some important locations seemed to have rows of sad concrete and or cast-iron shelters, but of course that might have been on the part of the Authority which owned the land and provided the facilities. Perhaps it's worth mentioning too that standards were different in a grirrt working class town whereas Norwich was considered to be the unspoken capital of East Anglia I guess. Probably the only drawback here buswise was being at it's heart one only really saw Eastern Counties buses even if in the NBC era it was by another name. Now called Ambassador one of it's coaches a Duple Dominant bodied Leyland Leopard  makes a call on it's way up to Great Yarmouth.    

2 comments:

  1. The 79x series were Eastern Counties' "Eastline" limited stop services, similar to the Midland Red companies' "Midland Express" services. Ambassador Travel was at the time ECOC's coaching unit, later hived off into a separate company for privatisation. I think the 790 came from Cambridge.

    So, what you have caught on camera is a National Express liveried coach with Ambassador Travel fleetnames operating an Eastern Counties 'Eastline' service. I think that's what would today be called a branding failure!

    I don't suppose any of the passengers cared, though, except that they may have thought a National Express coach was a step up from the usual (otherwise identical) red-and-white DP-liveried coach.

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  2. Thanks Ross, yes those bland names were very forgettable.

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