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Plymouth day trip.

Colourisation is a double edged sword. At its best it opens up a new aspect to our hobby, gives pleasure to the person doing the 'work' and hopefully to most viewing. It also allows hitherto mediocre captures to have a new lease of life. On the flip side, those undertaking the job need to have a good basic idea of how the scene should look, with in particuular, accuracy of the livery being interpreted in the case of a bus / coach. If its wrong, you're re-interpreting history.

In the case of this view of Mounts Bay Coaches Duple Commander IV AEC Reliance NUR 484H, I only have my memory to refer to. Try as I might, I couldn't find a single colour photo on line of this coach with that operator. My memory tells me that its livery was much lighter than their standard two tone blue (present on their Plaxton bodied Leyland Panther the same day).

The original negative to this was totally out of focus too, but via a convoluted path of sending the scanned image to my phone, some black magic in the latter allows an 'un-blurring' feature to help us out. Its not 100%, but it improves matters dramatically. This then is a colourised version of the sharpened original.

NUR 484H was one of a pair of similar AEC Reliance 691s (the other being 483H) new to Whytes of Colnbrook in 1970. This was her in 1976 at Plymouth's Bretonside Bus Station where I'd arrived aboard as a 15 year old on a day trip from Hayle. What a crackin' ride home it was 'competing' with and trouncing the aforementioned Panther on the climbs.

I believe, after service with Penzance based Mounts Bay, it moved on to Roselyn Coaches of Par where it joined many other AECs.

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Uploaded on March 10, 2025