United Counties Omnibus is an English bus company, operating in Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, and parts of surrounding counties. It was established in 1921 as the United Counties Omnibus & Road Transport Co Ltd, and from 1933 has been named the United Counties Omnibus Company Ltd. The company's trading name was simply United Counties until 1987, and after being purchased by the Stagecoach Group was Stagecoach United Counties until 1999, before finally disappearing. United Counties Omnibus Company Ltd is now just the legal identity of the Stagecoach subsidiaries which are trading as Stagecoach in Northants and Stagecoach in Bedford. Since 2010 it has been renamed Stagecoach Midlands and the Bedford based services given to the Peterborough and Cambridge based Stagecoach East.
United Counties Omnibus was originally established as part of the privately owned Tillings organisation. From 1948 to 1987 it was a state owned nationalised company operating as a subsidiary first under the British Transport Commission, then within the Transport Holding Company in the 1960s, and finally under the National Bus Company (NBC). In 1987 as part of the privatisation of the NBC, it became one of the few ex-NBC companies to be bought directly by Stagecoach.
Read more about United Counties Omnibus: Early History, Nationalisation, Privatisation, Subsequent History
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—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“An omnibus across the bridge
Crawls like a yellow butterfly,
And, here and there, a passer-by
Shows like a little restless midge.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)