OLD PHOTOS: inside York's old bus factory

Reader Dave Reynolds, whose dad Ted used to work in the factory, sent in four photographs of the factory. Two show the inside, with workers at work on the wooden frames of what will become buses.

Two more are external views. One of these shows a completed bus parked out on Lansdowne Terrace; the other a group of workmen standing in front of a bus. Dave's dad Ted is the tall man standing in the middle.

Ted was a joiner, Dave says. During the war, he'd helped to build aircraft for Fairey and Blackburn, moving into bus-building at the end of the war.

"There was a shortage of buses, and a mad rush to build them," says Dave, who lives in Acomb.

He remembers one Saturday, when he was a very small boy, his dad took him along to look around inside the NMU factory when there was no-one there.

Inside the NMU factory

His father worked for the company for about five years, Dave thinks, before moving to BRS (British Road Services) in York, where he made lorries.

We'd love to hear from any other readers who have memories (or old photos) of either NMU or BRS.

Meanwhile, since we're on the subject of early road transport in York, we have dug a few more photographs out of our archives.

They show:

• Whip-ma-Whop-ma-Gate, in a photo thought to have been taken between 1953 and 1955. The shop on the right that no longer exists was Joyway Shoes. The bus was a number 5 heading for Dodsworth Avenue, and the truck was a vehicle owned by T Belt & Sons Ltd, of St Maurices's Road, York.

Whip-ma-Whop-ma-Gate in the 1950s

• Museum Street in 1934: our photo, which we believe originally came from the city council's Imagine York website, shows a motor bus overtaking a tram which is already passing a parked car

Museum Street, 1934

• Cyclists and buses, again in Museum Street, this time in 1955

Museum Street in 1955

• St Sampson's Square on a busy market day in 1951, with cars jostling for space with pedestrians and stalls.

St Sampson's Square, York, on a busy market day in 1951