This radically updated third edition encompasses the very latest developments in motorcaravans. It is full of practical information for both new and experienced owners and includes an overview of models, maintenance and repairs on habitation elements, explanations of construction methods, practical advice concerning appliances, and detailed descriptions of motorcaravan supply systems. The content is invaluable for owners of both leisure vehicles based on van conversions and coachbuilt models constructed on a separate chassis. Guidance is also given on accessories, weight restrictions, modifications, restoration work and self-build projects.

Founded in 1895 under the aegis of R.H. Lea, the company originally built cycles and motorcycles but, by the 1920s, was established as a manufacturer of high quality sporting cars. From the 1930s to the 1960s, Lea-Francis specialized in medium-sized cars built with care and the best quality components. Successful in motorsports, "Leaf" was an innovative company, but a lack of regard for good business principles led to fluctuating fortunes throughout the company's long life. This text tells the story of the firm.

From about 1910 to the mid-1920s, the cyclecar was a popular means of transport. Cheap, simply engineered, often crude, it was really just a motorcycle engine with a lightweight chassis and body (the cyclecar/microcar often being the product of cycle and motorcycle technology). It created, however, a new market of people who could now afford a motor car; it was no longer the perserve of the well to do. The simplicity of the cars meant that they could easily be built in small quantities and this led to a growth in the number of motor manufacturers. Some, who graduated to make motor cars, even survive to this day, including probably the most famous British marque - Morgan. It was an international phenomenon with makers in France, the UK, USA and Germany producing cyclecars, albeit for various time-spans. A few makers survived into the thirties, but most had disappeared long before, killed off by the introduction of real cars at low prices, such as the Austin 7 in Britain, the German Dixi and the baby Citroens in France. The concept was not to die, however, as the French retained an interest in cyclecars beyond this period and were producing small cars such a as the Mochet throughout the Second World War. Inside the pages of Minimal Motoring is a selective history of both the cyclecar and microcar, accompanied by period photographs, advertisements and artwork.

Coach styles at the start of the 1950s were still very traditional. All that was about to change with the introduction of the new underfloor-engined chassis and an increase of maximum length. Improvements in technology helped styles become more adventurous and flamboyant as the decade progressed. The 1960s heralded the motorway age, coaches becoming bigger from 1961 and capable of cruising at much higher speeds. Styles moved with the times and by the end of the decade the maximum length increased to 12 metres. Continental coach holidays increased in popularity and European coachbuilders started to sell in the UK in increasing numbers, with executive and high-floor coaches much in demand. After a slow start in 1972, Volvo headed the influx of foreign chassis manufacturers and within fifteen years home-built coaches were in the minority. Supported by a wealth of fascinating images, Tim Machin takes the reader on a journey through these changes.

The era of advanced, automated and electric vehicles (AAEVs) has begun; the legal transformation is starting. In July 2018, parliament enacted the Automated and Electric Vehicles Act 2018, legislating for electric vehicle charging and allowing a direct civil claim against the motor insurer of an automated, ‘self-driving’ vehicle. In May 2022, the UK government announced its intention to create a new legal category for e-scooters. In April 2023, a ‘hands free’ advanced driver assistance system was approved for use on certain motorways across England, Wales and Scotland. Motor vehicle technologies have developed since the nineteenth century and have affected numerous aspects of our lives - from road safety to the environment, from the laws of civil liability to the rules of compulsory insurance. As AAEV technologies proliferate, their effects are likely to spread further, into legal areas less associated with motor vehicles such as equality and privacy. This book describes the emerging laws of advanced, automated and electric vehicles in England and Wales, explaining: - The development of motor vehicle laws (including vehicle specification law, the law of motor insurance and the laws of passenger transport) and putting new AAEV laws into their historical and legal contexts - The laws of civil and criminal liability relating to motor vehicles and how those laws are adapting to AAEVs - The public laws relating to motor vehicles which are likely to be affected by AAEVs, including environmental law and the laws of equality, of data protection and privacy This book will help those litigating, adjudicating, regulating and studying AAEV issues. It gives the context and detail of AAEV law in its many applications. It is a map to a fast-changing legal landscape. This title is included in Bloomsbury Professional’s Cyber Law online service.

The Metropolitan counties of South and West Yorkshire have some of the most intensive bus operations outside Birmingham and London. The former metropolitan counties include considerable amounts of rural terrain alongside densely populated urban areas. Author Peter Tucker takes us on a lively photographic tour of the region’s transport scene. The journey takes us everywhere from genteel towns like Horsforth, Ilkley and Wetherby down to areas of heavy industry such as the Don Valley in Sheffield. In between we visit places as contrasting as Barnsley, Dewsbury, Pontefract and Rotherham and Swinton. Yorkshire’s cosmopolitan cities are not forgotten either, as we explore Bradford, Leeds, Sheffield and Wakefield. Featuring operators such as Arriva, First and Stagecoach, this publication also looks back to the 1990s with photographs depicting buses of the now defunct Yorkshire Rider, Yorkshire Traction and West Riding.

The low-floor bus was first introduced to the streets of London in 1994 with a fleet of sixty single-decks entering services with London Buses Limited, passing quickly to the new privatised operators. These vehicles were not that popular, and no further examples arrived into London until 1996 in the form of the Dennis Dart SLF. It was almost another two years before the first low-floor double-deckers entered service in the capital. The early 2000s saw low-floor buses flood the capital, mainly of the DAF and Dennis variety, with a smaller number of Volvos entering service. The second generation of low-floor vehicles were introduced to the capital in 2006 in the form of the Enviro range produced by Alexander Dennis Limited. The Enviro 200 and 400 models were taken into stock by many London operators, but some chose other models. With 180 wonderful photographs, David Beddall has produced a fascinating tribute to this part of London's bus history.

Recounts the history of the Good Roads Movement that arose in progressive-era Alabama, how it used the power of the state to achieve its objectives of improving market roads for farmers and highways for automobiles Getting Out of the Mud: The Alabama Good Roads Movement and Highway Administration, 1898-1928 explores the history of the Good Roads Movement and investigates the nature of early twentieth-century progressivism in the state. Martin T. Olliff reveals how middle-class reformers secured political, economic, and social power not only by fighting against corporate domination and labor recalcitrance but also by proposing alternative projects like road improvement and identifying the interests of the rising middle class as being the most important to public interest. With the development of national markets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans began to regard the nation as a whole, rather than their state or region, as the most important political entity. Many Alabamians wished to travel beyond their local communities in all seasons without getting stuck in the mud of rudimentary rutted dirt roads. The onset of the automobile age bolstered the need for roadmaking, alerting both automobilists and good roads advocates to the possibility of a new transportation infrastructure. The Good Roads Movement began promoting farm-to-market roads, then highways that linked cities, then those that connected states. Federal matching funds for road construction after 1916 led state and federal governments to supplant the Good Roads Movement, building and administering the highway system that emerged by the late 1920s. Olliff's study of how Alabamians dealt with strained resources and overcame serious political obstacles in order to construct a road system that would accommodate economic growth in the twentieth century may offer clues to the resurrection of a similar strategy in our modern era. Many problems are unchanged over the hundred years between crises: Alabamians demand good roads and a government that has the capacity to build and maintain such an infrastructure while, at the same time, citizens are voting into office men and women who promise lower taxes and smaller government.

In 1959 there were twenty-seven Corporation Transport systems in the Red Rose County. These were significantly reduced in 1969 with the creation of the Passenger Transport Executives in Manchester and Liverpool and further reduced in 1974 following the reorganisation of local government, when boundaries were changed and new administrative boroughs created. All but two of the remaining systems were privatised during the 1990s, following the deregulation of bus services in 1986. Rossendale clung on to its own transport organisation until 2018 when it too was bought out by Transdev, leaving just Blackpool Transport as the only council-owned operator within the redrawn county boundary. This book picks up the story following local government reorganisation in 1974 and uses a comprehensive selection of photographs to depict the closing years of all of Lancashire's Corporation Transport systems.

'You see them everywhere' was the slogan adopted by Bedford when advertising its commercial vehicles in the 1930s and it held true for many decades. The company set out to produce reliable vehicles at an economic price. Catering to the small trader with its 30cwt and 2 ton trucks, and 6cwt and 10/12cwt vans, the company was one of the leading manufacturers within its first seven years. During the war Bedford produced more than 250,000 lorries for the armed forces, such as the 15cwt 'pneumonia wagons' and the more solid 3-tonners. With a return to peacetime conditions, Bedford was able to produce new vehicles which it had been unable to launch during the war but regained market supremacy by 1947, when the company produced its 500,000th truck - the first British manufacturer to reach this figure. Bedford entered the market for heavier vehicles in 1950 and its one millionth truck was produced in 1958. Two years later the first of the TK range was announced and the concept of cab ahead of engine was introduced. This basic chassis layout has been followed ever since. The changes of design, use and loads carried in the course of 50 years of steady progress are illustrated in this book, which proves the truth of the slogan, 'You see them everywhere'.

SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER. As you'll discover in his incomparable memoir, inventor, mechanic, TV presenter and walking tall as the definition of the British eccentric, Edd China sees things differently. An unstoppable enthusiast from an early age, Edd had 35 ongoing car projects while he was at university, not counting the double-decker bus he was living in. Now he's a man with not only a runaround sofa, but also a road-legal office, shed, bed and bathroom. His first car was a more conventional 1303 Texas yellow Beetle, the start of an ongoing love affair with VW, even though it got him arrested for attempted armed robbery. A human volcano of ideas and the ingenuity to make them happen, Edd is exhilarating company. Join him on his wild, wheeled adventures; see inside his engineering heroics; go behind the scenes on Wheeler Dealers. Climb aboard his giant motorised shopping trolley, and let him take you into his parallel universe of possibility.

Since 1990, there have been a number of major changes to bus operations in the East Anglia region. Major operators have continued to grow, while some independent operators that had come into existence as a result of deregulation in 1986 have since diminished or vanished entirely. Despite this, a wide variety of operators can still be found, most of whom are featured here with a plethora of different liveries and styles that have come and gone. The period has also seen the advent of the low-floor bus, which is also covered here. Utilising a wealth of previously unpublished images, local bus enthusiast David Moth looks at how East Anglia's buses have changed since 1990 across an area including Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and northern Essex.

In 1904, when Leicester Corporation opened its state-of-the-art electric tram network, it enjoyed a monopoly on routes and convenient central terminal points. But soon the first small independent motor bus companies became active, and by 1921, Midland Red - shortly to be the largest operator in England outside London - was busily establishing itself. The city fathers were faced with a quandary; protecting their territory and services, and possibly extending them, albeit in the face of determined competition, whilst at the same time endeavouring to provide termini that were as invitingly close to the city centre as possible. In this they were assisted by the 1930 Transport Act, which provided the template for fifty years of fairly peaceful co-existence between Leicester City Transport and Midland Red. That is until the provisions of a new Act in 1980 set them at loggerheads again. Leicester's Trams and Buses - 20th Century Landmarks examines in detail the background behind five key events - the opening of the electric tram network in 1904 and its closure in 1949; the arrival of Midland Red in Leicester in 1921, via the protracted planning for Leicester's first proper bus station, to the so-called bus wars in the deregulation and privatisation era of the 1980s. It concludes that it was the pursuit of policies, at local and national government levels, which ultimately led to opportunities being missed that could have provided Leicester city and county with a fully integrated modern-day network.

A new addition to the Pictura Puzzles series for 7+ years, Awesome Vehicles showcases amazing machines that go. Create a busy sailing scene, design your own rally car and draw a jet plane display team in action in the sky. Step into the awesome world of illustrator Scott Garrett, with fun facts that fire your imagination and stickers to colour, to bring to life some of the most impressive vehicles on Earth.

Tin toys had been made in Japan before the Second World War, but they reached new heights of realism in the 1950s. The postwar American occupation of Japan gave Japanese toymakers ready access to the lucrative American toy market, and as a result most of the tin toy cars made in this period were based on American vehicles like Cadillacs, Chevrolets, Buicks, Oldsmobiles and Packards. Like the real things, these tin toys were big. A small one would be around eight inches long, with some of the largest stretching to eighteen inches. As such, tinplate was the ideal medium to capture the look of American styling of the 1950s, a period when size mattered, and car manufacturers tried to outdo each other with the extravagance of their designs, the size of their tailfins and the amount of chrome. During this era of consumerism, Japanese toy production was at its peak, with exotically-named manufacturers like Marusan, Bandai, Yonezawa and Alps turning out vast quantities of tin toys. It proved to be a short-lived phase in the history of toy production. By the early 1960s, tin toys were falling out of fashion for various reasons: their sharp edges gave rise to safety concerns; die-cast models were becoming increasingly realistic and sophisticated, with many action features that appealed to children; the development of plastics in the toy industry made tin toys look increasingly old-fashioned. Half a century later, there are very few surviving examples of these magnificent playthings. Bruce Sterling of New York has devoted years to seeking out the very best examples of Japanese tinplate cars and has built up what is probably the world's finest collection of these toys, every one of them in pristine condition, complete with their original boxes which are works of art in themselves.This book showcases 150 examples of the very rarest Japanese tin toy cars, many of them never having been pictured in books or magazines until now. Almost every major American motor manufacturer is represented here, together with a selection of commercial vehicles and a significant number of European cars, too. All are illustrated in full colour and described in detail, and fascinating insights are provided into both the real vehicles and the companies that modelled them, together with a guide to rarity and current values. This is a book that will be treasured, not only by specialist collectors, but by all who are passionate about vintage toys and classic vehicles.