Fork in the road for old buses in unique Keighley collection

Transperience, an ambitious “leisure park” on a disused railway site south of Bradford, had been intended as a retirement home for old double-deckers, trams and other relics of a bygone age of passenger transport. It even had its own tram line, but it went spectacularly off the rails and closed in 1997 after just two years, at a cost to taxpayers of nearly £12m.

Some of its buses were auctioned off and rerouted 15 miles up the road to Keighley, where another transport museum had already been established. But now it too is struggling, literally, to keep the roof over its head.

“We’ve just spent two hours mopping water from the floor. It’s pouring in,” said its secretary, Norman Shepherd, after a rainstorm. “It’s getting to the point where we can’t carry on here.”

The old foundry by the River Worth had been designed with apertures in the roof, which were perfect for letting steam escape but less good at keeping water out.

“It was only ever designed to be a temporary home. We moved here in 2005, thinking we would be out in 18 months,” said Mr Shepherd, a retired lorry driver who is one of around 15 volunteers looking after the collection of 105 vehicles, including five London Routemasters.

They had been taken there after the charitable trust which runs the museum outgrew its first home at nearby Denholme and then lost its replacement premises in the centre of Keighley to the local college.

Its collection is one of the biggest in the country but the funds that pay for its upkeep have been decimated by the absence this year of visitors.

“Hiring out vehicles for wedding generates around £20,000 a year, but we’ve lost all that as well as our income from local galas. That makes it harder still to find suitable premises,” Mr Shepherd said.

The absence of any grant money also did not help, he added. “We’ve tried lottery bids but we’ve got nowhere because the building is only rented. A bus museum in Oxford was given £25,000 recently but we’ve been knocked back by everyone.”

The trust’s main source of income at the moment is from the fees it charges the private owners of some of the buses for garaging them.

As the search goes on for a hangar-like space of at least 50,000 sq ft, if not in Keighley then in Skipton, Halifax or perhaps Shipley, the volunteers have enlisted the help of their local MP, Robbie Moore.

“I know they’ve had some trouble with their current building,” he said, after seeing the leaking roof at first hand. “I will do all I can.”

The collection at Keighley Bus Museum includes the world’s oldest surviving double-deck trolleybus, a 1924 Straker-Clough which saw service with Keighley Corporation.

It is also home to the last trolleybus to run in Britain, in March 1972 from Duckworth Lane in Bradford, long after most towns had dismantled the overhead cables they ran on.

The domestic vehicle from furthest afield hails from Bournemouth.

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James Mitchinson