bluenose25

I edited the grille image to make it symmetrical and evenly lit. Just an idea, may or may not have looked like this.

Another expansion. Grand River wouldn't be much of a run from Sydney (maybe 2 hours in the 1940's), but might have been all that they were up to prior to the chassis was modified. If it was modified for engine size, that to me would speak to a need for greater range. If modified for wheel base or for a rear extension, that might only mean more seats.

I have more in this expanded pic. (The book is in one province, and I am in another.) But if the chassis was modified (as stated), would that change the front end appearance? Maybe change the bumper height? Throw Studebaker in the mix as possibly either the bus body or the chassis. The year is specified on the page reverse as being 1942-1944, although I would contest this and still place it c1948. The bus possibly ran from Halifax to Sidney. A roof rack would make more sense for long distance travel (like Halifax to Sydney). A roof rack would permit travelers to carry more luggage, and would increase freight capacity - freight being more likely with a run of that length than with a shorter local/regional run. In the 40's, Halifax to Sydney would likely take 8 hours one way. Might be unidentifiable if custom. Magnified view using a low-power microscope.

Good ideas, similarities to both the schoolbus and the railbus. As a railbus, would it need the three running lights over the windshield? No rails or ties visible in the shadows, but could be a "de-railed" railbus design. Many of the pics I viewed had School Bus painted there. With the grille on the front, the terminology might be "forward engine".

This picture appeared in a book about a small town in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. The picture can be accurately dated with a year or two of 1948, although the bus could well be older. The picture was tightly cropped to fit the available page space in the book, but the front appears to be symmetrical and the right half is completely there. The design could pre-date the use of destination plaques above the windshield. A military bus wouldn’t need one, though. Could be a school bus, might be yellow, but the luggage rack on top wouldn’t make much sense. The three running lights about the center of the windshield weren’t universal. There could be a slight lean-back aerodynamic shaping to the front, hard to say. “cab forward (U.S.), flat nose (Canada)” seems to fit. Very truck-like – possibly a modification? Side windows seem regular, though. No front plate, no visible permits. I've looked at hundreds of pics with Google, but few resemble this. Thoughts? (Thx.)

I believe that the car was bought new at a dealership in, or near, Port Hope, Ontario. Are there lists of car dealerships from times past available online somewhere? Would this have been a domestic dealership selling a line of imports or would this be an imported car dealership? I did find Toronto dealership pictures here. https://www.blogto.com/city/2017/01/what-car-dealerships-used-look-toronto/ If no Austin dealers in the port Hope area, maybe is was bought in Toronto. Austin Motors, corner of Yonge and Davenport, 1950's.

I know the family was quite proud of the car. They took at least two photos that day - one with the family in front of the car and one with the car by itself. (Jojo got to be in both pics.) Jojo was a dog who thought he was a loner but he knew it wouldn't last, Jojo left his home with Austin Cambridge owner 'til they parked on backyard grass, (you know the rest of the words...)

This does have the same lines. "The Oxford (Farina) competed with models such as the Singer Gazelle and Vauxhall Victor."

Thanks for the replies. Now to break the news to the daughter. Another wikipedia pic, of the rear end. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_Cambridge#/media/File:Austin_A55_Cambridge_MII_Rear.jpg

You got it. I found an image of one from your description. No wonder Vauxhall searches were not working. Here is a link to this pic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_Cambridge#/media/File:Austin_A55_mkII_Cambridge_1959_front.jpg

The original owners were family friends. Their daughter is the one who called it a '59 Vauxhall, as soon as she saw the picture. She said: "We did not have that car for long as my dad was involved in an accident that pretty much totalled it." I don't think a repair would change the body side, would it? I'll take a look for Envoys.

I have two old pictures in the family, taken at an uncle's house, of what I believe to be a 1959 Vauxhall. I was hoping to find a picture of a restored one, or one in a catalogue, with the same body lines, features and colouring but I just can't quite seem to match these pictures with anything entirely. I can see that there is a gently curving body line from the headlight to the rear end. It does look like a chrome piece ends the black-looking upper part ha;f way across the rear door. There is an unusual indent below the driver door. The front chrome is like two parts - a horizontal section where the turn indicators are and a rectangular, possibly oval, grille. There is chrome across the lower part of the rear quarter panel.The roof seems to stick out a bit over the rear window. The image is scanned from a slide and colour correcting has not removed enough of the red tint to be able to tell what the original colour combination was. I have done google image searches for 1958, 1959, and 1960. I have seen pictures of similar cars but I actually did not find even one with this same side body line. The car was bought in Canada. I do know the dog's name - Jojo. Would anyone be able to tell me a little bit more about this car?

I was going through a binder of negatives I have that I thought were all for pictures I had as prints. Apparently not, and in a surprisingly big way. I have only looked at a handful of the negatives so far. One looked like a car. I scanned it with my Epson XP-440 (all Epson all-in-ones are the best scanners, can de-screen newspaper articles, have high resolution, etc. Cost - I paid $49 for this unit. There is always one model in this price point. The price point has to do with print quality, not scanner function). I then "inverted" the scan with Photoshop 6 (20-year-old software). This technique yields a "proof", so I will know which of these negatives I should process as film. The result is this... Lo and behold, a picture I had not seen before, of the car in question. My maternal grandmother (face blurred), two of her kids, and in the car (looking down) is my grandfather. Why post this after the topic has gone solved and stale? Because of the visor. No denying it is a visor of some kind, nothing in the background to confuse it with now. So, for anyone researching this car, there can be a visor. That's a horn pointing forward just below it, I believe. If anyone does know what this visor was like, I'd be interested. Was it chrome, perhaps, or fabric? Or something else altogether?

No offence taken. I can add that part of the reason I have altered certain parts of photos is so they don't appear out of context. I have had issues with ancestry material I've created and put online being grabbed by inconsiderates and thrown into ancestry.ca, a site I don't participate in, and into private websites. Credited or uncredited, some of the material has become erroneous over time, as I have developed new information and theories from new material making its way online. I have no way to fix it, anyone finding it may not be getting the truth. And I'm not talking about public information like census facts and dates, I'm talking about opinion and conjecture. I had one rogue tell me that anything on the Internet becomes public property - he could not be persuaded otherwise. Imagine... in his mind photos of professional sports, newspaper articles, patents, scientific papers, etc. were his to do with as he wished. People who haven't read the fine print may be posting images of their kids on Facebook, etc. that may wind up undesirably and uncompensated for on the cover of a cereal box.

Thanks, zipdang, I appreciate you taking the time to comment.