As part of our coverage of the 50th anniversary of the Leyland National, Jonathan Welch concludes his conversation with Basil Hancock, and looks at the fate of the first articulated versions
Continuing my conversation with former Leyland engineer Basil Hancock, I asked whether the National should be seen as a success. “I think as a city bus, it did what it needed to. It wasn’t bad as a bus for lots of fleets, but when you put it on longer routes you needed better seats and luggage capacity. It wasn’t really a cheap rural bus either. It was trying to do everything. If there had been three models – a city bus, a rural bus and an interurban bus – it might have been better, but it would have been difficult to do that with the one model in a highly standardised factory. But the investment had been made, and that is what we had to work with.”
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