Books by Malcolm Batten

Telling the story of this unique and popular heritage railway. Explore its story up to the re-opening in 2012 and of the ten years of progress since then.

Thames in Transition -the changing nature of the Docks and the ships that served them in the 1970s-1980sHow and why the Docks adapted to changed cargo handling methodsHistorical scenes of the River from the 1940s-1960sMost photographs previously unpublished and can never be re-captured

There have always been small buses used by bus companies for a variety of reasons, but in the 1970s a number of companies employed van-derived minibuses on experimental services such as Dial-a Ride schemes. These were small-scale operations. From around 1984 the majority of British bus companies started buying minibuses in bulk. They began replacing full-size vehicles and soon whole town local networks were being converted to their use. At first these continued to be on small, van-derived chassis - Ford, Freight-Rover and Mercedes-Benz - seating around sixteen passengers, but soon larger, purpose-built vehicles began to appear from companies sometimes unfamiliar to the British bus market. There were also attempts to produce 'midibuses' - larger than a minibus but smaller than a full-size bus. By the mid-1990s the boom had come to an end. Larger vehicles started to replace many of these minibuses. Although modern accessible minibuses are still produced and still have a role to play, it is a far cry from their heyday. This book looks back at the rise and fall of the minibus in British bus services.

The larger bus operators, whether municipal or company owned, have traditionally trained their own new drivers. Normally older vehicles from the fleet were retained and adapted for training, adorned with 'L' plates. In earlier days they would usually just retain fleet livery. Sometimes they might receive a separate livery, to warn other road users. When the National Bus Company introduced corporate liveries of red or green for its fleets, many of their constituent companies used yellow for their training and service vehicles. Then, as recruitment became more difficult from around the 1980s, colourful liveries with invitational recruitment slogans tended to appear and this has continued since. Rather surprisingly, companies often bought in buses for training from other companies rather than converting their own, and these might be types not otherwise represented in their fleet. This book looks at a variety of training vehicles from around the country over the last fifty years, including examples that have survived into preservation.

With previously unpublished photographs, this book documents the variety offered by the local railway scene.