Wigan Album

Just imagine , if all these buses could have been mothballed at the Melverley street shed , instead of being scrapped or sold for buttons , they could have covered the cost of all the rigmarole thats currently going on in the town centre .

I wonder if a Corporation Bus was lucky enough to end up in The Crich Transport Museum ? The bus service in these parts are run by a local coach company ^ are big & red with names like Goliath & Hercules , not a bit like the friendly buses of days gone by.

Saw a single decker bus in Westhoughton that looked to be in the old Wigan bus colours.

I saw the same bus in Ashton on Monday PW , it just said on the front Bee Network and Wigan depot.
It also had a couple of men wearing yellow jackets in the back, taking notes.

I was just about to say that I’ve seen that single decker myself coming into Wigan .
Arriva used to run one as well that was liveried in corporation colours before Bee network took back control .
It may possibly be the same bus , but I don’t know .
Ray would have known .

Body work by Northern Counties, circa 1948-1950, as it is not listed in the Massey Bros book by Phil Thomas. In fact, between 1938 & 1957 Massey never built for Wigan Corp.

I was talking to my nephew the other day .

He lives up on the A6 at Clayton le Woods, and he tells me that his wife saw a double decker in Wigan corporation livery at a bus stop across the road recently .

I suggested that it may have been the single decker in question on a training run , so he rang her up , but no , she was adamant that it was a double decker .

But what’s a double deck Wigan corporation bus doing up there on the Preston to Chorley route ?
Bee network don’t do that route do they ?
And besides , does a double deck corporation bus exist outside of preservation ? ….

Nah ! … I’m not having it … I reckon she must have been sampling the contents of the drinks cabinet instead of getting on with the ironing .

Regarding the original photo - Googling the bus's registration number leads to the info that it was a Leyland Titan PD2/1 with a Leyland body (Leyland Motors built bus bodies as well as chassis at one time in the distant past). It was new in 1950 and withdrawn by the Corporation in 1968 - long before GMT came on the scene.

It looks like Wigan Central station was still open at the time - there's a water column for refilling steam locos visible to the left of the picture - making it sometime before late 1964.

There are some parked cars off to right through the haze (must have been before the Clean Air Act too). Maybe an old car guru can identify one or two of them, which might help in estimating a date.


Regarding modern buses painted in Wigan Corporation colours - when First Bus ran buses in Wigan (must be well over 10 years ago) they had a phase when they repainted one of their vehicles into the "heritage" liveries of various operators who had gone to form Greater Manchester Transport. So, there was a maroon & cream Wigan-coloured double decker at Wigan depot, a pale green Bury Corporation bus at Bury depot, a dark green Salford one in Salford etc. I think there was even a red & grey Lancashire United one knocking about too.

The Wigan lookalike one looked aw reet. Copy this link to see an online photo https://flic.kr/p/gjNKC7

Not sure about the recent Corporation bus discussed above though.

That’s interesting English Electric .

I wonder if the bus pictured in your link is the one that she saw .

I’ll email a screenshot of the bus to my nephew for possible identification .

Thanks for that .

Sorry, Helem. Crich is a TRAMWAY museum rather than a transport museum and no Wigan buses are preserved there. There are no Wigan trams preserved anywhere.

There is a single decker in Wigan Corporation colours always as Wigan Depot on the destination think it's used for staff bus if the council now run the buses why not paint them back to 'corpi' colours nicer than these yellow things

I would tend to agree with you there Joe .
But at least G.M.buses are back being operated ‘ in house ‘ as it were , and that’s all that matters in my view .

The general public are no longer being shafted by the likes of Arriva and Stagecoach , and three quid to go the full distance of any route doesn’t seem like that bad a deal to me .

So at those prices I can live with yellow .

Wigan's bus routes are still operated by private companies, albeit under the umbrella of The Bee Network. The main operators are the Go-Ahead Group (Go North West) and Rotala (Diamond NW) with TfGM co-ordinating the timetables and routes. The £3.00 maximum fare is a country-wide initiative rather than just Greater Manchester.