I attended King Edward's Stourbridge from 1956 to 1963.

In 1956 we lived in Halesowen and I travelled on the 130 to school. Then in February 1957 we moved to Kingswinford with 257, 882 or 885 to Stourbridge. At first I was upset as the 130 Birmingham route tended to have the newer buses, but I soon got to love the greater variety on the Kingswinford services. No fewer than seven garages supplied buses!

Stourbridge, the "home" garage I suppose, but only one bus allocated in the Mon-Fri daytime 9 am to 4 pm service not counting the "unadvertised", i.e. not found in the timetable services, which seemed to be a feature of Midland Red in those days. Then Wolverhampton with two buses on the Mon to Fri service and possibly more at weekends.

In the late 1950s these used to be Wolverhampton's newest D7s more often than not, but by the 1960s the allocation was downgraded to the LD8s which were the workhorses of that garage. Hartshill provided the Mon to Fri daytime service on the 257 which then terminated at Kingswinford, but the journeys continued to / from Dudley as the 260 via Pensnett. Kidderminster and Bromsgrove each provided a bus for the weekday 885 (Wolverhampton to Kidderminster every 2 hours, but much more frequent on Saturday / Sunday).

A typical Midland Red quirk saw two Cradley Heath buses on single peak am journeys on the 257. Then the 8.30 am 257 from Kingswinford to Stourbridge was the sole Dudley working and a very convenient bus to get to school on time. Usually (but not always a GD6) until about 1961 this journey actually started at Penn and always carried the number 882. However this practice stopped when Stourbridge started using a larger D9 on the 882 that ran 5 minutes later and from then 8.30 am ran as had always been shown in the timetable

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