WITH all the current health restrictions in place when using public transport – don’t stand too close in the queue, wear your masks etc etc – I just wondered how they would have coped in the old days, the very old days.

Back in the stagecoach era, catching Covid by snuggling up to your fellow travellers  would probably have been the last of your worries, some way behind being robbed by highwaymen or rupturing your spine after bouncing around on the rutted tracks that passed for roads.

But as these images from our “Buses of Old” file show, once the travel process became mechanised, they crammed as many on board as they could to  make the operation viable. Even though there was plenty of draught about you sat in such close proximity to your neighbour there was a very decent chance of being infected by whatever they had.

Original public transport in Worcester and its environs was horse drawn, first using carts and carriages and then in 1881 along came the horse-drawn tram, a much larger vehicle that could accommodate passengers both inside and on top. These were succeeded at the turn of the century by the electric tram, with large areas of the centre of the city-ripped up to lay the necessary tracks.

But slowly creeping up was the advance of the internal combustion engine and the arrival of the motor bus, which led to  the creation of the Worcestershire Motor Transport Company to champion its cause. Midland Red took over the WMTC bus routes in 1914 and in the same year, Worcester and Birmingham were first linked with a regular bus service, the good old 144, which still runs today.

READ MORE: The roots of Little London's name

Even so, by 1925 public transport within the City of Worcester was still provided by a network of electric tramways operated by Worcester Electric Traction Company Limited from its depot off the Bull Ring in St John’s (now the Co-op supermarket), but  motor buses  were needed to link areas of the the city to locations not served by the tramway network.

The City Council wanted to improve transport in the ever expanding Worcester, but tramways are very inflexible and expensive to upgrade, and it had very little say in the Electric Traction operations. Eventually the council managed to gain control of the local transport operations through an Act of Parliament and this eventually led to the closure of the entire tramway network, the end of operations coming on Thursday, May 31, 1928.

Trams were replaced by a new network of motor bus services with ‘W’-prefix route numbers, which was operated by the Birmingham and Midland Motor Omnibus Company with depots at East Street and Padmore Street, and ushered in a world that’s still familiar today.