Coach-fleet fitter downs tools after 46 years

A fitter with a Newark travel firm will soon be swapping tinkering with coach engines for a seat in a Tiger Moth aircraft.

Mr Malcolm Leary, 69, will take to the skies as part of his retirement gift from Travel Wright, where he has worked for 46 years.

Mr Leary was 23 in June, 1964, when he left Brookes Motors on Farndon Road, to become a fitter servicing and maintaining a fleet of nine vehicles at Travel Wright.

Those nine vehicles, then based on Northern Road, were on the Newark to Ollerton bus route, on school runs to Southwell and Tuxford and on occasional coach trips.

In additional to maintaining its own fleet, Wright’s also had contracts to care for the fleets of many of the town’s hauliers.

“The work was a lot dirtier in those days. The engines were filthy with diesel,” said Mr Leary, of Rolleston.

The size of the Wright’s fleet grew over the years. The firm now has more than 30 buses, coaches and associated people carriers.

“Today if you have to strip an engine, and we don’t need to often, you give them a quick wash and they come up spotless,” Mr Leary said.

“Modern vehicles are getting far more complicated. At one time you wouldn’t think of getting someone in from the outside to look at an engine but these days it’s all specialists with their laptops.”

Mr Leary, whose retirement plans include gardening, hung up his trademark train driver’s hard hat — the only type, he said, that was suitable to keep grease off his head — at the end of his last shift at 10pm on Friday.