Three-way split

摘要

Change was a constant of the bus industry in the 1980s and early 1990s. At the National Bus Company the biggest subsidiaries were being split up into smaller units - Midland Red, London Country, Ribble-the list is long. Then after privatisation most of those smaller units coalesced into bigger businesses once again, under the ownership of emerging groups such as Stagecoach and British Bus. But turn the clock back 50 years to the start of the 1960s and the picture was very different. There had been changes in the early postwar years, as some substantial private businesses sold out to the new state-owned British Transport Commission, but generally the 1950s and 1960s were a period of bus industry stability.