BUSWORLD PHOTOGRAPHY

I AM CHRISTOPHER LEACH THE ARTIST. I started this blog so that I can share with everyone my vast collection of transport photographs showing a personal and nostalgic view of the industry with images that span some 45 years taking in the U.K and some of Europe. I have no darkroom and so rather than being the perfectionist after tidying them up I upload the images warts and all, and even those that won't scan squarely or are scratched. In a way it adds age and character. You are all free to download these for your personal use but please remember I still own them and you are not just free to use them without prior permission for any knd of publishing. Click on images to enlarge them and if you want to see more leave your comments or visit my website for the mother-site with galleries including those Buses & Girls: PICTUREWORLD

Friday 22 February 2008

What does Lausanne have in common with Walsall?


Under it's innovative or some might even say eccentric General Manager Edgley Cox, the rather bright and shocking almost electric-blue painted buses and trolleybuses of Walsall Corporation were a fantastic mix of the old, the new, and the secondhand. Added to this there were in-house rebuilds and the expertimentation of strange concepts like a record breaking jumbo-sized Fleetline whilst just a few years earlier the Corporation had ditched the front-entrance concept altogether and ordered these extra short 26ft long Daimlers with the entrance behind the driver and no front overhang to speak of looking a bit like today's Optare Vario or those futuristic ugly round-fronted-snake-bus- trains they are operating in York which remind me of something from the adventures of Dan Dare. Most Swiss fleets seemed rather conservative in comparison and the larger concerns seemed to standardise on well-tried Swiss products but Lausanne seemed to have everything. Here are two good examples as not only did the concern prefer trailors they also ran oddities like a few impressive imported German bendibuses from MAN, and at the other end of the age scale in December 1988 was No.630 one of the oldest members of the fleet, an ancient looking trolleybus that might even have started life with somewhere like Zurich as TL was not adverse to buying secondhand either.

2 comments:

Andy R said...

You are right.

This is ex Zürich 188, a FBW/BBC version of the Tr51, delivered in 1957 and sold to TL in 1966 or 1969

christopher said...

Thank you, I knew some of these old TL buses came from Zurich.