page_title: Southampton Corporation Transport
section_title: After the War
hierarchical_section_title: Southampton Corporation Transport / After the War
caption_attribution_description: English: Southampton Transport Corporation 64 (ex 164) Guy Arab III open top bus (FTR 511) Owned by D Fereday Glenn. Scanned from a Kodachrome 35mm slide.
context_page_description: Southampton Corporation Transport motor bus services started in 1919 as a successor to Southampton Corporation Tramways. After Southampton achieved city status in 1964 it was renamed Southampton City Transport. In 1986, as a result of deregulation it became Southampton Citybus, an arms-length company that was sold to the staff in 1993. It continued trading as Southampton Citybus until it was bought by First Bus in 1997.
context_section_description: After the trams finished in December 1949, the Shirley Tram Depot was converted into a bus garage and was first used on 16 July 1950, therefore reducing the number of empty trips from Shirley to Portswood, saving time and resources. In 1951 with housing developments rapidly being built in Millbrook and Harefield, new bus services were needed. Two years after the abandonment of the tram network the Transport Department found itself cutting services because of financial problems. The chief problem was that too much "dead" mileage was being run and some services were not carrying sufficient passengers. The summer of 1952 saw the long-awaited high capacity Standee buses being delivered. The Standees were used on services 5A, 8 and 16, and these routes’serviced the Woolston and Bitterne areas of the city. With the Shirley Depot becoming fully capable of dealing with most routine maintenance and some body work, Portswood nevertheless remained the most important depot of the two as it had a body shop, paint shop and also had equipment for all major mechanical repairs. Buses that were based at Shirley carried "S" on the nearside upper deck front panel.
  Service changes were carried out throughout the 1950s to respond to increasing demand. One of the first joint services to operate with joint Hants & Dorset Motor Services was the 54 to West End, which came about in 1953 with the expansion of housing estates. For example, Townhill Park while most was in the 'town' boundary, some it was in Hampshire and so came under the territorial Tilling operator. The summer of 1955 saw an interesting development, which was that two post-war buses were converted to open-top and repainted in a cream and red-lining livery. These were used on a Town Tour, which started on Sunday 8 May 1955. In July 1957 another two services were jointly operated by both the Corporation and Hants & Dorset; the first being from the Town Centre to Millbrook, which was the first to be introduced, and the second being an express coach service from Civic Centre to Southampton Airport, but this was subsequently withdrawn after 6 months due to poor passenger numbers. New large estates were being built across the City and all of them required public transport. A number of services could be diverted or extended to service the new estates. The only estate that needed a new service to be introduced was Thornhill. This requirement saw the birth of the 18 service, which was introduced on 15 December 1957, and ran from Central Station to Thornhill via the Civic Centre and Bitterne.
  A scheme proposed in 1955 for developing Pound Tree Road in the City Centre as a bus centre. The plans included new shelters and bus stands but it wasn't until the spring of 1959 that services started using the Centre. Since the war the Transport Department Office had been housed in temporary accommodation due to the Above Bar offices being destroyed during the Blitz. Plans for a new headquarters were on the cards for many years but it was not until 12 December 1960 that new headquarters were opened at 224 – 226 Portswood Road, containing facilities for the management of the Transport Department as well as a canteen. In the earlier 1960s a major programme of fleet replacements was undertaken with the Department testing a number of buses to replace the Guy Arabs that were dating back to 1946. The bus chose to replace the Guy Arabs were Leyland PD2/27s. The first batch to arrive in Southampton was numbered 301–312 and were 27 feet long and 8 feet wide. In 1963 more Guy Arabs were withdrawn as more new buses were arriving this time in the form of AEC Regent Vs.
caption: Guy Arab III open top bus in the 1979 Centenary Cavalcade
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