From its formation in 1919 in Wigan, Lancashire, Northern Counties Motor & Engineering Company Limited grew to become one of Britain's most prominent bus builders.
One of the great names of the British bus and coach industry was Royal Blue, whose vehicles were a familiar sight on the express routes between London and the West Country.
The first forty-five years of the twentieth century saw the most formative period in the history of commercial vehicles: in 1900 the mechanically powered lorry was a novelty, yet by 1945 the ancestors of today's 38-ton juggernauts were clearly identifiable.
The years from 1969 to 1975 were a time of great change for buses in England and Wales as operations were consolidated and rationalised under the publicly owned National Bus Company.
Like many of the conurbations across Britain, the Greater Manchester region in the 1990s offered a fascinating mixture of buses from operators both large and small, new and established.
Nowhere had the nineteenth-century rivalry between competing railway companies had a more marked effect on the much later motor-omnibus industry than in the South West of England.
Although to many enthusiasts, municipal vehicles never extended beyond the trams, trolleybuses and buses that were required to provide the basic public service, behind them were a range of vehicles that were required to enable operations to proceed smoothly.
The North Western Road Car Company is just a fading memory now, but for fifty years its red and cream buses served a broad sweep of England's North West from the Cheshire plain to the Pennines, and from Manchester's industrial mills to the threshold of the Potteries.
When the words Buses of North Staffordshire are used most people will think of PMT, and later First, running through the urban areas of Stoke-on-Trent, with additional vehicles from a few medium-sized family-owned operators thrown in for good measure.
Inspired by the AEC Routemaster, the New Bus for London, later renamed the 'New Routemaster', was the first bus specifically built for use in London since 1968, when the last Routemaster machines were constructed.
Southdown Motor Services, renowned for their impressive fleet of green and cream buses and coaches, also operated an impressive fleet of ancillary vehicles.
When Wolverhampton's horse-drawn trams were replaced by the unusual surface-contact Lorain system electric trams in 1902, it was one of the first such networks in the country.
From demonstrating a petrol-engined double-decker at the 1905 Commercial Motor Show to building huge 100-seat Olympians for the overseas market, the Bus and Coach Division of Leyland built thousands of vehicles for markets all over the world.
The deregulation of the bus industry in 1986 led to the formation of new bus companies in Central Scotland such as Clydeside, Kelvin, Strathtay and Magicbus (Stagecoach).
Luton & District was formed in 1986 to operate the former southern depots of United Counties; it was sold by NBC to its employees in 1987 (a first), then sold again in 1994 to British Bus.
After the 1969 nationalisation, bus and coach companies had generally continued with their traditional liveries and, in 1971, it was decided the time had come to apply a corporate image to state-owned bus operations.
Roaring through the millennium into the twenty-first century we find the Transport Act 2000 that allows for increased cooperation between local authorities and operators, something that had not been allowed previously under competition legislation.
