A couple of posts ago I put up an inquiry about Southbound Transport bus company from Shalendra Ramadhar. I have since had the following from my informant Frank Beeton:
Share this:I have just seen the request in FAD for information on Southbound Transport .
I can tell you that I had some contact with them around 1974/75. There were twelve brothers named Ramanand who lived with their families in one huge house at Isipingo near the railway station and ran one bus on a route, I think, in the Clairwood/Jacobs area. The bus was an underfloor-engined Leyland Worldmaster with bodywork built by Bobby’s Coach Works of Clairwood.
I was working for Lawson’s Autodiesels in Umgeni Road at the time, and tried, unsuccessfully, to sell them a Volvo bus!
By the way, anybody with an interest in Durban’s Indian Bus operators should try to get hold of the fascinating softcover book: “Indian Buses – The History, The Memories, The Personalities”, that has been written by Zainul Aberdeen, and published by Osborne Porter.
Ronika Ramanand
Southbound buses were a family-owned business. My dad was one of the brothers.
Shalendra Ramadhar
Those were the memorable days of my dad and his brothers. The name Southbound was named after my grandfather Pancham Ramanand, in totat it was a fleet of five buses including my dads one, whom he bought from NR Moses.Southbound grew as the tears went by and alsobq driving school which was run under the same name.Passengers should wait for certain buses coz of the music which was heard miles away.
Maria
Hi Allan,Here’s positive itifdinecation of the buses. They were Daimler COG6 chassis (Gardner diesel and 4-speed preselector gearbox) fitted with 58-seater Weymann bodies and imported complete from England. The Daimler COG6 was the Durban Corporation’s standard double-deck motorbus before and during WW2, there being about 40 units in the fleet with Wemann and Park Royal bodies. The colour scheme was grey with cream bands. They were replaced from 1947 by similar units (Daimler CVG6).By the way, the tug and floating crane pictures are also very nostalgic for me, because my grandfather (Francis Samuel Beeton) was the steam driver (i.e. engineer) on the pilot tugs Ulundi and Harry Cheadle, and the floating crane, before his death in 1955.