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Old colour scheme


Henry Pond

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With regards to the old blue and cream colour scheme, I'm sure that there were different wheel hub colours, red or blue. I also recall that a teacher said that this differentiated between the Sheffield Transport buses and the Joint Omnibus Commitee ones. I also have really vague recollection that there was a third "owner". Can someone set me straight?

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The hub colour allegedly had something to do with the local government of the day..if the Labour party was in power at the Town Hall then the bus wheels were red and so on.

As for the ownership of Sheffield buses...well the Sheffield fleet was in fact three different fleets.

The first (A fleet) was owned by the corporation and thses vehicle ran inside the 1929 city boundary.

If you were travelling a fair distance from the City to somewhere like Bradford or Manchester the you would be on a C fleet vehicle and these were all owned by the railway companies LNER and LMS. They would however be operated by the corporation who acted as agents for the railway companies.

Any distances in between these would be operated by the B fleet which was a joint concern belonging to the corporation and the railways and again although ran by the corporation. The costs and any profits were split between them.

Each vehicle had the letter A,B or C on it to show who it belonged to, but they all carried the same legal lettering showing that they were operated from Division Street.

The begining of the end was when the railways were nationalized and eventually their share in Sheffield Transport was handed over to the National Bus Company which in turn passed this on to its own local companies such as Yorkshire Traction and East Midlands.

That was the end of the joint committee after Forty years.

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The hub colour allegedly had something to do with the local government of the day..if the Labour party was in power at the Town Hall then the bus wheels were red and so on.

As for the ownership of Sheffield buses...well the Sheffield fleet was in fact three different fleets.

The first (A fleet) was owned by the corporation and thses vehicle ran inside the 1929 city boundary.

If you were travelling a fair distance from the City to somewhere like Bradford or Manchester the you would be on a C fleet vehicle and these were all owned by the railway companies LNER and LMS. They would however be operated by the corporation who acted as agents for the railway companies.

Any distances in between these would be operated by the B fleet which was a joint concern belonging to the corporation and the railways and again although ran by the corporation. The costs and any profits were split between them.

Each vehicle had the letter A,B or C on it to show who it belonged to, but they all carried the same legal lettering showing that they were operated from Division Street.

The begining of the end was when the railways were nationalized and eventually their share in Sheffield Transport was handed over to the National Bus Company which in turn passed this on to its own local companies such as Yorkshire Traction and East Midlands.

That was the end of the joint committee after Forty years.

Interesting - but now I'm confused as this would appear to be before my time. Nationalization in the forties wasn't it, and I'm talking about late 60's early 70's, so just before the coffee and cream and sypte era. Who ran the busses then?

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Ah...that would be my mistake!

I meant to say the buses were nationalised.

Most bus companies were given over to the National Bus Company (NBC) but the vehicles ran by Sheffield were given over to the PTE.

Just before the PTE took over the buses were all ran by the corporation as set out above.

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Guest bus man

As far as I am aware the colour was red however in the late 60s blue appeared it was at the time that the convservatives won control of sheffield city council it then reverted back to red - whether it was due to the change in council control is open to debate .

Remember that sheffield did have a fling with green livery for a while in the 1950's

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Guest littlemalc

The blue wheel centres were indeed painted in the mid sixties when the tory's, briefly, ran the council, they went back to red with the return of labour. I must admit, for me, the gorgeous blue and cream wth red wheel centres was synonymous with Sheffield, and to my mind, still one of the most attractive schemes ever seen anywhere in Britain.

When coming back from holiday, and you saw the first cream and blue bus, you knew you were truly back home.

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