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Section 4:
The Coaches
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Anecdotes written by people who actually travelled on the coaches
The coachmen, the inns, the coach proprietors - they’re all here. Come in and meet them
Britain’s roads were pretty impassable for most of our history. Coach travel was very difficult until they improved
Wheeled transport evolved over many years. Find out how coaches developed
Sources and information about how I came to create this website
Home Page of the Coaching Website
Coach services were given names, a tradition that survived well into the railways when express trains carried names like the Cornish Riviera Express, or The Flying Scotsman.
In the case of the railways, only the express trains were named services, but back in coaching days, almost every coach had a name to distinguish it from others. Route numbers, as we see on today’s buses, were yet to be thought of.
In the age of coaching, before the famous Bradshaw Guide to train services began to be published, there was Paterson and Cary. They published an annual guide to coach services known as Patersons Roads which was encyclopædic and contained lists of coach names, routes, times and distances.
The were described by one author as “an interminable array” The “Highflyers,” “Rockinghams,” “Unions,” “Amitys,” “Defiances,” “Wellingtons,” “Bluchers,” “Nelsons,” “Rodneys,” and may other names. Some names became so popular that they were often triplicated — and sometimes occurred six times — on the local and byroad coaches; with the result that if a traveller desired to travel by the “Highflyer,” let us say, to Edinburgh, he had to carefully sort it out from other “Highflyers” which flew not only to Leeds but to all kinds of obscure places.