Lancaster City Transport
1952
Daimler CVG5
Northern Counties B35F

NTF 466 is a Daimler CVG5 with Northern Counties B35F body, built for Lancaster City Transport in 1952. There were three of them, but 467 and 468 were withdrawn in 1958. They had B32R bodies [with door!] when new and 466 was converted in the operator’s workshops to forward entrance layout in 1958. Now restored to her original livery, she carried Trafalgar Blue and White for a time after the ‘shotgun marriage’ of Lancaster and the adjacent Borough Of Morecambe & Heysham in 1974. [The other three Councils involved - Carnforth Urban District, Lancaster Rural District and Lunesdale Rural District - didn’t seem to object anywhere near so much, but Lancaster and Morecambe & Heysham had never ‘got on’.] She was retained for so long after her sisters for a very simple reason. Her 7ft 6in body was narrow enough to fit through the gateway of Lancaster Castle. Most of the place had been used as a prison for many years and this was the last vehicle in the fleet capable of taking the inmates to the prison’s farms. She is seen in the museum in St Helens on 15 August 2012, and the adjacent information board tells us she was known - for fairly obvious reasons - as ‘the prison bus’.

Photograph and Copy contributed by Pete Davies

---

10/05/15 - 16:28

A beauty, looking good. Would have loved the big old CAV headlamps (if indeed she once had them) but you can’t have everything! I can’t spot the date she actually retired- was it a record?
Am I right to wonder if she also got one of those neck-cricking OMO "squint" windows to the cab when the door was moved?

Joe

---

10/05/15 - 16:49

I believe it was withdrawn in 1977 but kept as a keepsake until the end of LCT in 1993

Paul Turner

---

11/05/15 - 07:12

I quote from a former employee of LCT, Richard Allen, who supplied me with much information about the company which enabled me to provide a fleet list for this site: "NTF 466 was new as B36R just like NTF 467/8. It was rebuilt to B32F for OPO from 01/58 and in 06/1970 it was upseated to 35 in connection with the prison contract which it worked. It was considered too slow and laborious for OPO when underfloor engined buses were arriving, so 467/8 were never considered for conversion and were sold at the end of 1958".
It doesn’t answer your question, Joe, about windows, but if it did acquire something different it doesn’t sound like it was used for very long!

Dave Towers

---

11/05/15 - 07:12

Am I right in thinking that Trafalgar blue wasn’t the first choice of the "transport department" - didn’t they plump for a maroon colour with "City of Lancaster" fleetname to start with? I think the blue livery/Lancaster City Council fleetname was the result of a decision to adopt a "house-style" across the Council.

Philip Rushworth

---

12/05/15 - 06:57

Philip, In the early days of the merged operation, both sides kept their old colours with CITY OF LANCASTER in Tilling style as the fleetname. I have photographs of both backgrounds with that name. Certainly, the Trafalgar blue and white appeared to be the "house style" which came in fairly quickly.

Pete Davies

---

14/05/15 - 07:19

There was a good article in the February-March issue of ‘Classic Bus’ on the Lancaster-Morecambe & Heysham merger. It is written by Thomas Knowles who was GM of the combined undertaking from the outset and he outlines the problems he had with bringing the two former operations together. It contains plenty of good photographs.

Philip Halstead

---

This bus was repainted in Trafalgar blue in 1977 as part of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee celebrations and ran a service along Morecambe seafront over that summer its prison bus replacement was a Tiger Cub with single door East Lancs bodywork.
A friend who was a management trainee with Lancaster once told me that this bus also survived so long because the prisoners could not overpower the driver in his separate cab!

Chris Hough