Midland “Red”
BMMO and MROC
Midland “Red” Motor Services (BMMO & MROC) All types - Overview

Midland “Red” Motor Services (BMMO & MROC)
All vehicle types — Overview

Introduction

Birmingham and Midland Motor Omnibus Company Limited (BMMO—Midland “Red” Motor Services) first started operating on Tuesday 1st August 1905. Initially, services were operated with a mix of horse and motor omnibuses, but the early motor omnibuses were found to be unreliable and were replaced by horse buses from Saturday 5th October 1907, but from Saturday 25th May 1912 the motor omnibuses returned. In 1923, the company started building their own design of buses and coaches and this practice continued until 1970, although production was interrupted during the Second World War. To supplement their own vehicle production, the company also purchased vehicles from outside manufactures, and after production of their own vehicles stopped in 1970, new vehicles were mostly supplied by Leyland.

Under the control of the National Bus Company (NBC), BMMO was renamed to Midland Red Omnibus Company Limited (MROC) in March 1974, and ceased trading as a bus and coach operator at the end of trading on Saturday 5th September 1981. It is the aim of this section of the website to document as many details as possible about all the vehicles operated during the companies seventy-seven years in operation. This monumental task is a long way from being finished, and is still very much work-in-progress, so at this time some vehicle types are not included and other types are only shown as parts of fleet lists.

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non-BMMO built vehicles (pre-1923)

Before 1923, all new vehicles operated by Birmingham and Midland Motor Omnibus Company Limited (BMMO—Midland “Red” Motor Services) were supplied in chassis-only form by an outside manufacture then fitted with a separate body, often supplied by a different manufacture (although in some cases Tilling supplied both). Bodywork was often changed from one chassis to another several times during the lifetime of the chassis, and before a change in the law in 1921 a registration number was not allocated to a specific vehicle or chassis so could therefore be transferred easily to any other vehicle in the fleet. Because of this, many early registration numbers were used more than once, being taken from a withdrawn vehicle and used on a new vehicle, for example.

Prototype, Development and Experimental Vehicles

Website section under construction, “History and Allocations” page only available at this time.

BMMO designed and built “SOS” vehicles (1923–1940)

Vehicles built by Birmingham and Midland Motor Omnibus Company Limited (BMMO—Midland “Red” Motor Services) before the Second World War were designated as “SOS”. No official record has been found to confirm the meaning of this, but two versions are commonly used. These are “Superior Omnibus Specification” and “Shire’s Own Specification”, the latter being suggested as being named after Mr LG Wyndham Shire, the Chief Engineer at BMMO from 1912 until his retirement in April 1940.

Website section under construction, “History and Allocations” page only available at this time.

BMMO designed and built vehicles (1945–1970)

Prototype, Development and Experimental Vehicles

Website section under construction, “History and Allocations” page only available at this time.

non-BMMO built vehicles

Website section under construction, “History and Allocations” page only available at this time.

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This function will search all currently stored records of vehicles, of all makes and models, owned or operated by the selected company. These records are not yet complete but new records are continually being added and at this time a total of 11,092 records are stored. 7,015 of these records are for vehicles owned and/or operated by the selected operator.

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