Peter Tulloch's Bus & Coach Review   Another superb picture and story from Peter's archive. October 2009

A number of coach companies ran continental coach tours during the 1930s. Some were quite quick off the mark in restarting those tours after WW2, a number of which used Foden coaches. h

One such company was European Excelsior Motorways from Bournemouth, run by the Maitland family. They bought two Fodens; one was a Gardner 6LW engined coach with a Plaxton full fronted 33 seat body, JLJ 375, whilst the other was altogether a more luxurious coach. KEL 250 was a PVFE6 model, with Foden's own two-stroke engine, and carried a distinguished looking Harrington body which seated only 22 passengers in superbly luxurious seats. This must have been one of the most comfortable coaches to have been touring the continent in the early 1950s.

A report in the September 1950 edition of Foden News describes how it easily overtook another Foden, a PVSC6 model of Westbury Coaches of Bristol similar to JLJ 375, whilst climbing the Susten Pass in Switzerland. Indeed, its speed and hillclimbing prowess were the talk of the season amongst the continental coach tour firms that year. After a gruelling seven year life on the continental tours, KEL 250 was pensioned off by European Excelsior Motorways and retired to the Manchester area where, for the next three years the coach served no fewer than three different companies before being sold for scrap in 1960. Imagine my surprise, then, when a good friend of mine sent me a postcard from Switzerland in 1967 showing a typical Swiss hotel with four coaches in the large parking area - one of which happened to be KEL 250! - and no cars. Alongside the Foden is one of the typical Swiss Saurer postal coaches of the period.