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This history is a compilation of facts and images from many sources drawn together to tell the story of a public transport route. The plan is to produce some light reading on Social History with pictures of buses, Anoracks need not apply. Where known the authorship of pictures is credited in the text or caption. It is not my itention to clone sections of another person's work and claim it as my own. There are only a limited number of ways to say "Eighteen Hundred and Frozen to Death was the year of the bad winter", but I have tried as far as posible not to quote whole passages of existing publications. Some personal recolection is included, I was not born for the first eighty years of the saga but I might just remember reading something on the subject even if I cann't name my source.
The development of the villages of Acton, Ealing, Hanwell, Southall, Hillingdon and Uxbridge owe as much to the tram and bus as many other villages around London owe their growth to the railway. Anyone traveling along the route from Shepherd's Bush to Uxbridge will notice long sections of broad tree lined avenue crossing the once open space between individual villages. The road was mainly built by the tramway companies at their own expense to a specification far in excess of anything the municiple purse would allow in order to win the licence to run a tram service. Thus the concept of "private" money being used to provide public infrastructure is proved to be over 120 years old.
The way in which the Uxbridge Road compliments train services from the western villages towards central London is best pictured eastbound into London from Uxbridge. Departing from a common point in Uxbridge the bus and train immediately diverge. The Metropolitan Line heads slightly north towards Ruislip and east to Baker Street. The Uxbridge Road climbs the hill onto Hillingdon Heath at the south of the parish, a real bus breaker in the days of under specified vehicles. Through Hayes and Southall the Uxbridge Road parallels the Slough to Paddington line of the old GWR, keeping it far enough south to avoid being a rail feeder. At the boundry between Southall and Hanwell at the sites of the AEC works where many famous buses were made and Southall (HW) & Hanwell (HL) bus garages, all lost to "progress" the Iron Bridge carries the railway north over the road to run quite close through West Ealing and Ealing Broadway before the train swings slightly more north to line up for its run into Paddington. For the final leg from Ealing to Shepherd's Bush the road is shadowed at a safe distance by the Central tube line. So the journey is made from Uxbridge to Shepherd's Bush, never far from a railway, but never in competition with it.
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