tbtc
Veteran Member
DTC had been funded by a loan from the main shareholder, Darlington Borough Council, who then put DTC up for sale. We all know what then happened in that Yorkshire Traction trumped Stagecoach's bid so Stagecoach flooded the town with free buses drafted in from across their empire, duplicated the registrations by literally using the same paperwork but subtly amended, and poached the vast majority of DTC's drivers with the business turning turtle about three days later. In that environment, Your Bus quickly sold out to North East Bus aka United (by now owned by West Midlands Travel)
Interesting stuff, but raises a few questions (that I hadn't considered before).
1. Was this before/after Stagecoach took over Busways and the Middlesbrough operations (forgive me, I can't remember the name of the pre-Stagecoach name for that opreation)? I remember the huge fuss made at the time but assumed that Stagecoach must have had large nearby operations in order to consider flooding the town - in hindsight, Darlington isn't that large a place and wasn't exactly surrounded by Stagecoach operations, so seems a slightly strange place for them to throw so many resources as (but, I type this as an outsider). I mean, I could understand the way that they took Perth (in the Perth Panther days), given that this was the home of Stagecoach etc etc (and could have understood it if they'd tried hard to win market share in some big cities), but Darlington seems a fairly small "prize" to warrant that level of bus war (IMHO).
2. United was owned by West Midlands Travel? Didn't realise. The whole history of United confuses me (e.g. the way that it was the NBC's operations in the north east of England but with a large gap in Tyne & Wear, so all the way from Berwick to Scarborough but Go Ahead was separate to it)… and you're saying that United was part of West Yorkshire, then became separate (but ended up as part of the same organisation under British Bus/ Arriva)? Genuinely curious as this area/time is a bit of a blind spot for me.