In the area now known as Greater Manchester, which is made up of south east Lancashire and north east Cheshire, buses were originally operated by the larger
local authorities in the area and several private companies.The local authorities provided all transport facilities for their own town and surrounding area, sometimes covering
smaller towns nearby. In this area the councils which provided their own services were Ashton, Bolton, Bury, Leigh, Manchester, Oldham, Ramsbottom, Rochdale, Salford, SHMD (Stalybridge, Hyde,
Mossley & Dukinfield), Stockport & Wigan. As well as local authority run public transport, a number of private companies also operated services in the area. These included Lancashire United
Transport of Atherton, North Western Road Car Company of Stockport and A Mayne & Son of Manchester amongst others.
In 1968 a new Transport Act was passed, under which the
transport operations of the local authorities in the area (with the exception of Wigan) were merged into a central organisation. This was named SELNEC PTE (South East Lancashire & North East
Cheshire Passenger Transport Executive) and was owned and operated jointly by all authorities involved. Each of the corporations' bus garages were split into three operational zones - Northern,
Central and Southern and buses from these garages were later identified by a depot code e.g. BY for Bury. Buses from depots other than Manchester Corporation's were given new fleet numbers also.
SELNEC adopted a new livery of orange and white, into which most of the buses were painted. They carried either Northern, Central or Southern fleet names with magenta (Northern),
green (Southern) or blue (Central) SELNEC flashes and appropriate divisional legal lettering. Eventually SELNEC started to standardise its fleet through the development of the SELNEC Standard. This was
a new type of rear engined, front entrance double decker which was designed jointly between SELNEC and the body builders and several vehicles ordered by the corporations (by then in SELNEC), but
had not then been built, were used in the development of the Standard. SELNEC Standards were usually either Leyland Atlanteans or Daimler Fleetlines with either Northern Counties or Park Royal
bodywork, although several one-off vehicles using other combinations were also built.
In 1974, the Local Government Act brought changes to the administrative areas and Greater
Manchester County was formed. SELNEC was then renamed Greater Manchester Transport (Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Executive) and this new fleet name was applied to all vehicles. In 1981
a new livery of brown, orange and white was adopted which replaced the SELNEC orange and white livery.
In 1981, LUT was completely absorbed into Greater Manchester Transport, having
been purchased several years earlier.
Deregulation in 1986 due to the 1985 Transport Act meant that Greater Manchester Transport was split into a bus operating company and a passenger
transport executive. The bus operating company, named GM Buses (Greater Manchester Buses Limited) remained under public ownership and Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Exeutive (GMPTE) had a
new role of managing service information and tendering, bus stations and stops etc.
Deregulation meant that the market was opened up to more competition and new companies were formed which
started to run bus services in the area.
In 1993 GM Buses was split into two companies - GM Buses North and GM Buses South. This was done to try to increase competition further by
having smaller companies. Both were bought by their employees, but have subsequently been bought by larger groups - GM Buses North is now First Manchester and GM Buses South is now Stagecoach
Manchester.
