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Coaches and long-distance buses

by Jane Tolerton

Travel in early horse-drawn coaches was slow, uncomfortable and dangerous, with vehicles sometimes swept away as they attempted to cross rivers. But Cobb & Co’s bright red coaches – which started out carrying hopeful prospectors to goldfields – became a New Zealand icon.


History of coaches

Passenger coach services began in New Zealand in the 1850s, but they had a slow start. Much of the country lacked roads, or even tracks, and mountains, bush and flood-prone rivers all made inland travel difficult. It was easier to sail.

Early horse-drawn coach services carried passengers, parcels and mail. Their viability often depended on landing a contract from the government to deliver mail.

Safer by sea

Although there was a coach service from Christchurch to Hokitika from 1865, coach travel was seen as a dangerous option. In 1881, a young commercial traveller, Vernon Lee Walker, described the route as ‘frightfully dangerous … Very few people will travel that way – preferring to come round by sea.’1

Cobb & Co

Cobb & Co, named after an Australian company, was New Zealand’s most famous coach company. Charles Carlos Cole, an American who had run coaches in Australia, arrived in Dunedin in 1861, just after gold was discovered at Tuapeka, 92 kilometres away. A week after landing, Cole left for Tuapeka at 5.30 a.m. in a coach drawn by four horses. He arrived that night, to the surprise of locals, who thought the trip couldn’t be done in a day. Cole set up the Cobb & Co Telegraphic Line of Coaches, and was soon running a daily service.

From 1863, Cole’s brother Lea ran L. G. Cole’s Cobb & Co in Canterbury.

In 1866 gold was again the spur for a regular service from Christchurch to the West Coast via Arthur’s Pass. The Cole brothers left New Zealand around 1870, but the company continued until 1923. Coach operators in other parts of the country borrowed the famous name.

Cobb & Co’s coaches were bright red with crimson plush seats. They were Concord coaches, like the classic American stagecoach developed in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1827. Concord coaches were light, strong, flexible and fast. They rested on leather strap braces rather than springs, so they had a swinging motion. They carried six people – or up to nine at a squeeze – inside, and five more people could perch on the box and roof seats. Parcels and luggage went on a rack at the back, and on the roof.

Trains and coaches

When the railway arrived in an area, trains replaced coach services, but coaches still took passengers from the railhead to other destinations. Trains were much cheaper and more comfortable than coaches. A coach trip in 1870 from Auckland to Hamilton cost 35 shillings, and to go as far as Cambridge was another 5 shillings. In 1909, coach travel was about four times as expensive as rail travel.

Motor power had taken over from horse power by the end of the First World War. The final Cobb & Co trip was in 1923, when the opening of the Ōtira tunnel meant the train could take the mail from Christchurch to Hokitika.

Footnotes
  1. Quoted in James Watson, Links: a history of transport and New Zealand society. Wellington: Ministry of Transport, 1996, p. 99. Back

Coach travel

Uncomfortable travel

Coach travel was uncomfortable. Sarah Courage described the effects of a trip from Kaiapoi to Leithfield: ‘My arms and shoulders for days afterwards … were all the colours of the rainbow; while my vital organs felt as if they were getting mixed up and entangled together.’1

Sad end for star

One poignant coach drowning was that of talented tightrope dancer and magician Jane Whiteside in 1875. Crossing the Waitaki River, most of the Oxford Combination Troupe walked over the bridge, but she remained in the coach. It capsized and she was drowned – aged 19, newly married, and having just become a star.

Passengers often had to get out of the coach to cross rivers, as few bridges had been built. On the Napier–Wellington route in the early 1870s, they crossed the Manawatū River in a basket, then took a second coach to the base of the gorge, and traversed the river again by canoe, before completing the journey by coach.

Dangerous travel

Coach travel was dangerous. Even though the horses were specially chosen and trained, they could shy or bolt, and tip the coach on its side. Coaches sometimes fell over cliffs or were blown off them. But the 19th-century ‘road toll’ was mainly from drowning while crossing unbridged rivers.

Sentenced to a coach trip

A coach trip was used as a law and order device by Dunedin police in 1869. Prostitute Barbara Weldon had appeared in court many times on charges of drunkenness and disorderly conduct when the authorities gave her a one-way coach ticket to Hokitika. There she was soon charged with using obscene language in a public place. She spent the rest of her life in and out of jail.

Coach drivers

Coach drivers were known as ‘whips’. Many won reputations as cheery daredevils who liked danger. In a 1940s publication, the early coach driver was romanticised as ‘usually a fine burly man, fearless and dauntless, caring not for danger be it flood, bushrangers or intricate roads hewn out of forest, beset with boulders or tree-stumps: the greater the danger, the better he seemed to like it.

‘Whips’ had a tough life. Hugh Craig began driving for Cobb & Co in his teens in the 1860s. The Tuapeka Times described how he was often ‘on the coach for 16 to 18 hours per diem, driving on the worst road in the world [between Clyde and Lawrence] and half of that time by lamp light …’3 Craig would reach Lawrence after 10 p.m., but set out again at 5 a.m., even in bad weather.

Unimpressive accommodation

Writer Anthony Trollope travelled by coach on his 1873 New Zealand trip. He was unimpressed by the accommodation houses: ‘The inns at which we were stopped were not delightful. The rooms formed of corrugated iron are small and every word uttered in the house can be heard throughout it, as throughout a shed put up without divisions.’4

Coaching houses

Accommodation houses were sited along coach routes, to suit horses as much as passengers. Horses had to be changed every couple of hours, and needed stables and blacksmiths. Many accommodation houses were very basic, often with narrow stretchers, rather than beds, packed tightly into small rooms.

When a coach service began along the coast between Wellington and Whanganui in 1858, Hector McDonald and his wife Agnes built an accommodation house and changing stables at the mouth of the Hōkio Stream.

Footnotes
  1. Sarah Amelia Courage, Lights and shadows of colonial life: twenty-six years in Canterbury, New Zealand. Christchurch: Whitcoulls, 1976 (originally published 1896), p. 38. Back
  2. Making New Zealand: pictorial surveys of a century. Vol. 2. Wellington: Dept. of Internal Affairs, 1940, p. 21. Back
  3. ‘The late Hugh Craig.’ Tuapeka Times, 4 December 1907, p. 3. Back
  4. Making New Zealand, p. 21. Back

Service cars

Service cars were large cars used for passenger transport. They appeared in New Zealand from about 1905, when there were very few privately owned cars.

Some horse coach companies moved into service cars. Rodolph Wigley, who had taken passengers to Aoraki/Mt Cook from Timaru by coach from 1886, made service-car trips to the mountain from 1906, collecting passengers from the Fairlie railhead – and forming the Mount Cook Motor Company.

Tyre trouble

John Rutherford drove the first horse-drawn coach to Aoraki/Mt Cook in 1886, and the first service car 20 years later. The coach had taken two days; the service car took just one. Rutherford drove one of Mount Cook Motor Company’s new De Dion cars, and company founder Rodolph Wigley drove the other. Between them they ran over two dogs and blew all the tyres – tyres cost the company more than wages in the first years of operation.

Newman Brothers, which had run horse coaches since 1879, started running service cars in 1911. They would later move into buses. The company was based in Nelson, where there was no railway.

Service car competition

Many small service-car businesses started up in the 1920s. By 1930 there were 597 service cars in New Zealand. No licence was needed to go into business, and car sales firms made it easy by extending credit to prospective business owners. The roads were improving, and pneumatic tyres made car rides more comfortable.

Dog-eat-dog business

In the fierce service-car competition of the 1920s and 1930s, some freelancers made a practice of arriving slightly earlier than a scheduled service and scooping up the passengers. The RM Company in the central North Island put touts on the Auckland–Rotorua train to push their services to passengers. And some drivers found treacle or sugar had been put in their petrol tanks, presumably by competitors.

Fierce competition meant fares fell, and operators often went out of business. By 1927 a dozen companies had come and gone on the Napier–Gisborne route, and in 1930 20 operators were fighting for customers between Auckland and Hamilton. Service-car numbers peaked in 1934 at 815.

Types of car

The early cars were the open ‘touring car’ style, often with a canvas hood that folded down. Cadillacs were by far the most popular make, and from about 1930, the Cadillac 353 V8 was the most common model. These were bought, often second hand, in the United States, and were ‘stretched’ and ‘rebodied’ in New Zealand, many by the Wellington firm Crawley Ridley. The chassis was lengthened, and a longer, wider body built in order to carry more passengers.

Many of these remained in operation until after the Second World War.


Early long-distance buses

Long-distance buses – also known as coaches – arrived in the 1920s. Numbers grew in the 1930s and 1940s when the roads had improved enough to carry larger vehicles.

What’s in a name?

The public may call them buses, but to the industry, long-distance buses are ‘coaches’. A ‘bus’ is a city omnibus. Coaches are usually bigger, heavier and more comfortable than omnibuses. The Bus and Coach Association of New Zealand – as its name suggests – includes owners of both city omnibuses and coaches.

Coach regulation

The Transport Licensing Act 1931 regulated New Zealand transport services. Bus companies had to be licensed, and their vehicles, timetables and fares approved, by the government. Companies liked the system because a licence gave them a protected place in the market. Anyone wanting to set up in competition had to prove that they would not damage an existing operator’s business.

But regulation was tight. If a company wanted to put on a bus to take people to a show, sports event or day at the beach, it had to apply for a special licence. This might not be granted, or might have restrictions – such as not being able to pick up passengers on the way. As ‘specials’ were in demand and were a good source of income, companies complained that they were held back from providing services and making profits.

Big days out

In the unregulated 1920s, Midland Motors’ Louis Laugesen ran ‘specials’. He’d paint ‘Races from Warners’ on the bus in removable whiting, then drive round the middle of Christchurch. By the time he stopped outside Warners Hotel in the Square, customers were waiting. On weekends and public holidays he wrote ‘Waikuku Picnic Bus’ in huge white letters, and collected queueing picnic parties with their lunch hampers and sun hats. After 1931, he had to apply for a licence to run ‘specials’.

Rail and Railways Road Services

Regulations protected the government-owned railways against competition from long-distance buses. The 1933 Transport Amendment Act said no new licences would be given to bus services that ran along railway routes, and goods could be taken no more than 50 kilometres by road along a route serviced by rail.

The government set up its own coach service, New Zealand Railways Road Services (NZRRS), which started on the Wellington–Whanganui route in 1934. It entered the tourism industry the same year, running four-day tours from Dunedin to the Southern Lakes.

NZRRS grew dramatically under the first Labour government, buying out 27 private companies between 1936 and 1939. In 1940 it had 138 coaches; in 1950, twice that. By 1980, it was three times as large as the next-biggest coach company, Newman’s Coachlines.

Private owners resented the government’s presence in the market – especially because it could protect its own transport operations. In some cases a company’s application to renew a licence for a route was turned down – and then it found NZRRS had taken over that route. NZRRS sometimes then bought the company’s buses, or even the company itself.


Long-distance buses: 1940s onwards

Wartime cuts

During the Second World War, long-distance bus routes were cut by voluntary and compulsory restrictions – to about 40% of pre-war levels by 1943. Meanwhile the prices of petrol, tyres and spare parts rose by about one-third.

Women drivers

The first woman driver of long-distance buses, in the 1930s, may have been Jean Hunter of Hunter’s DOT (Dunedin–Ōamaru–Timaru) Motor Services, or Amy Newby of the Hamilton-based Newby’s Motors.

Youthful driver

 

Amy Newby taught herself to drive by sneaking into the garage in the evenings and driving service cars from one side to the other. She took her test on her 15th birthday. ‘The poor inspector was so nervous he told me when to brake, when to signal a turn etc. When we arrived back at the garage, I attempted to take the narrow entrance in 2nd gear – clipped the benzene pump and hit a concrete post. I don’t think he wanted to repeat the experience as all he said to me was “I think you need a little more practice – come over here and get your licence”.’1

 

Many male bus drivers fought in the Second World War. Women took over office and driving work in many family-owned companies, but most stopped driving after the war. Some who continued met hostility from male drivers. Hilda Jamieson of Stratford’s Jamieson Motors recalled, ‘You’d see them get ready to wave, [then] turn their heads away. Wouldn’t recognise a woman! People in motor cars would look up and Oh my gosh! It’s a woman driving the bus! They’d all be looking out their windows.’2

New Zealand’s worst road crash

New Zealand’s coach fleet was in a bad condition in the two decades after the Second World War. The country’s worst road accident highlighted this. In 1963, the brakes failed on a coach crossing the Brynderwyn range, and 15 of the 35 passengers were killed.

Luxury Landliners

A popular innovation at the top of the market was the 24-seater Luxury Landliner with a refreshment service on the Auckland–Wellington run from 1948 (daily from 1952). Its route was calculated so it did not coincide with the main trunk railway line – but it was not allowed to pick up or put down passengers en route between the two cities.

Tiki tours

 

In New Zealand colloquial speech, a ‘tiki tour’ is a scenic tour to a number of places, or a roundabout way to get to a particular place. Originally, Tiki Tours were the low-cost coach tours the Government Tourist Bureau started in 1946. They initially went just to the hotels owned by the government’s Tourist Hotel Corporation, but developed into New Zealand-wide tours.

 

Tourism

Coach companies put together package tours to attract tourists – both New Zealanders and foreign tourists. Numbers of tourists from overseas increased from about 25,000 in 1960 to 48,000 in 1964.

Competition from cars and planes

In the 1950s the number of cars doubled, and the number of coaches fell markedly – from about 700 in 1956, to 466 a decade later. Air travel became much more competitive in the 1960s, and cheap second-hand cars were imported from Japan from the 1980s. More people used their own cars for long-distance trips.

Over these decades, as passenger numbers fell and services were cut, coach companies relied more on freight, mail and newspaper delivery contracts, and school bus runs. Many coaches carried passengers in the front half, and parcels, mail and newspapers in the back. These ‘composites’ or ‘freighters’ were common from the 1950s to the 1980s – before competition from courier firms.

Footnotes
  1. Quoted in John McCrystal, On the buses in New Zealand: from charabancs to the coaches of today. Wellington: Grantham House in association with the Bus and Coach Association of New Zealand, 2007, p. 60. Back
  2. Quoted in On the buses in New Zealand, p. 60. Back

Coaches after deregulation

Deregulation

The Transport Amendment Act 1983 changed the licensing system and ended government fare-setting. Coach companies no longer had to show a service was needed, just that they could deliver it safely and reliably. In 2009, the regulatory body was the NZ Transport Agency.

InterCity

In 1991, New Zealand Railways Road Services was privatised. Its long-distance services were bought by the InterCity Group, made up of the country’s largest private coach companies.

In the early 2000s, InterCity Group was by far the biggest coach company, carrying 1.5 million passengers a year – about 1.1 million New Zealanders, and the rest international tourists.

Addictive work

In the late 1990s Renee Snelgrove became New Zealand’s youngest female passenger coach driver at the age of 18, driving for the family firm, Tranzit Group. A decade on, she was a director of the company, as well as an employee, and a mother. ‘Driving coaches is addictive,’ she says. ‘You’re out on the road going somewhere and being in control of your own world. But when you look in the rear vision mirror and see 50 heads bobbing around behind you, you certainly feel a great sense of responsibility.’1

Family firms

Ritchies Coachlines and Tranzit Group, which are also both owners of the InterCity Group, are family firms that have flourished in the era of deregulation and privatisation.

Ritchies Coachlines, owned by the Ritchie family, is the largest privately-owned coach and bus operator in Australasia. It started in Temuka in 1937, and mainly did school runs for its first 30 years. In the early 2000s it operated throughout New Zealand on long-distance routes, and provided charters, tours and urban transport.

The Snelgrove family owns and runs Tranzit Group. Albert Snelgrove started the Grey Bus Service (later the Blue Bus Company) with a 19-seater Dodge coach in Carterton in 1924, later moving to Masterton.

International tourists

In 2007–8, 1.27 million tourists visiting New Zealand (56% of international visitors) travelled by coach. At the top of the market were luxury coaches with leather seats equipped with individual television screens and internet connections. At the other end were ‘hop on, hop off’ services for which backpackers bought a pass that could be used over months.

Naked Bus

Hamish Nuttall came up with what he calls ‘a unique New Zealand solution’ to long-distance bus travel when he set up the Naked Bus in 2006. The company plugs into existing services, owning few coaches itself. With an internet-only booking system, it offers ticket prices at less than its competitors – the first seat on every service is just $1. ‘Because New Zealand’s population is so dispersed it’s difficult to provide public transport, so finding a low-cost solution is important,’ says Nuttall, an Oxford University graduate who came to New Zealand to work as a transport consultant.2

Manufacturing

Kiwi Bus Builders of Tauranga are New Zealand’s main builder of coaches. New Zealand Motor Bodies, which closed in 1993, was previously New Zealand’s big name in coach manufacturing and exporting.

Industry body

The Bus and Coach Association New Zealand acts as a lobby group for both coach and city bus operators, which had their own separate organisations until 1965.

Footnotes
  1. Interview with Renee Snelgrove, August 2008. Back
  2. Interview with Hamish Nuttall, August 2008. Back

External links and sources

More suggestions and sources


How to cite this page: Jane Tolerton, 'Coaches and long-distance buses', Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/coaches-and-long-distance-buses/print (accessed 30 March 2024)

Story by Jane Tolerton, published 11 March 2010