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.

I had planned to make one more post about another car in the family on the maternal side that I thought belonged to my great grandfather. It is a picture I long remember, of my great grandfather and my great grandmother. The car is off to one side and for the most part only the rear is visible. It is parked just outside of a garage with one door open.The picture is one of the oldest I have. So, I wrote the post, and posted it. I thought the car in it was going to be too difficult for me to find on my own. It had one notable feature that I had been unable to find in searches - an oval window at the rear of the car. Not as large as other windows in other cars, certainly not rectangular, and just one window not more. Then I had a bit of an inspiration. I thought if his son owned a Buick, maybe the father owned one, too. So I focused the search on Buick alone and sure enough I found one. It looked familiar, and well it should. It was the same as the car that resulted from this search. The car in my great grandfather's driveway was the same car as the one in my grandfather's driveway. I removed the other post once I understood. So here is another photo, an older photo, of what I believe to be the same '23 Buick Country Gentleman, with my great grandfather and great grandmother having their picture taken, car in the background. Because of my great grandfather's advanced age (70 at the time the car was built), I now think he must have bought the car new only to pass it down to his son after a short period of ownership. It's an interesting parallel to the related post about the '35 Chevrolet Master DeLuxe sedan which turned out to be my grandfather's car being driven by his son. My great grandfather died just shy of his 80th birthday, in 1933. A close up of the car only with something similar to compare it to...

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

A picture of what I think is close to being the same vehicle is interesting. It was described in an article as a "1935 Chevrolet at the Berger dealership in Grand Rapids, Michigan". The full pic at the link is worth a look. http://carstylecritic.blogspot.com/2015/10/pontiacs-silver-streak-1935-debut.html The vehicle behind the car is Chevy also, I expect. The front of it can be seen as a reflection in the store window, more of it can be seen at the link. In the window display, there is a sign that says "RADIO". Libraries and newspaper archives are full of great old pics. Can't wait until they all get digitized and catalogued, and become searchable for content.

Thx, knee-action, for responding. From the first photo, I had it pegged as a 1935 Chevy Standard or Master Deluxe. I would defer to your conclusion that it is the Master Deluxe. I am a little confused about the trunk, though. Does this photo show the integral trunk of the sport sedan?

I have noticed that cars appear in a number of the family pictures I have. Sometimes their inclusion is accidental, sometimes intentional, sometimes unavoidable. The more ever-present cars become, the more they appear accidentally in pictures. Early photographs came out better when taken in daylight, this means they were often intentionally taken outside - where the cars just happen to be. Sometimes a car might appear in a photograph in the same way a member of the family or a prized possession might - people in them, people on them, people around them. Sometimes it is the car we are photographing and people just happen to be included, or not. When I started looking through albums of old photographs for cars, I saw the photographs differently. If the photograph had information written on or about it, the details would usually be when, who, and where taken. No one ever wrote on a picture “Such-and-such in a ’72 Ford Pinto 1.6L Kent I4 off to first year college” (and not just because it was a Pinto). Unless the car was the subject matter, it was usually not named. When I would look through family photo folders of digital scans on my PC, I had to look at Extra Large Icons – I couldn’t do file searches for “Chev” or “four door” because I had never entered that information in the image's name or in its metadata. I had to look at a decent preview, sometimes even a magnification, to see if there was an identifiable car in it. I have a lot of photographs and scanned images. What I don’t have is a photographic memory. I might remember that there were cars in the photos and images, but unless I had made a point of identifying the cars, I might not put two-and-two together to realize that a car in one picture is the same as the car in another picture, even if I could find them to compare. This, in fact, is what happened to me with this car. My Mom had a nice picture of her brother smiling out the driver’s window, and she had a picture of two infant nieces of hers on the lawn in front of the family home. At one time she had told me who the people were, but she didn’t say anything about “the car”. In both cases, it was just there. This is a cropped version of the photo of my Mom’s two young nieces, born in 1936 and 1938. In the full version, the car takes up only 1/12th of the image not 1/3 as it does here. The car is not nearly as prominent. There were two photos, actually, from slightly different angles. I chose this one over the other because it shows the rear door handle whereas the tree hides it in the other. The two girls are at the center of both originals, fully in view. Here, they are disinterested; in the other, they are looking at the camera. This is the same house and porch as seen in the pics of part 1 and part 2, just from a different angle. I realize now that this is the same car as the one in the picture above. It wasn't my uncle's car, it was the family car. Therefore, in all likelihood, this would have been my maternal grandfather's third car, the one he drove in 1939, with the radio.

Having determined that my maternal grandfather's first car was likely the '23 Buick Country Gentleman (in part 1), and his second car was likely the 1929 Chevrolet four door sedan (in part 2), I have been looking for a picture of a car that could have more likely been the one that my 14-year-old Mom and her father could have been in when they heard the radio broadcast discussing Canada's declaration of war on Germany. This occurred on September 10, 1939. On another front, I had been looking at a picture of an unknown car with my uncle smiling out of the driver-side window, hands on the steering wheel. The picture only shows the area around this window but there is quite a bit of detail in the picture. My uncle looked to be in his twenties, but it's tricky with old photos. People often look older than they actually are. People grew up faster years ago, it seems. Born in 1919, my uncle joined the Canadian Army when the war came about. I believe this picture was taken before he went overseas, so that would be likely before 1940. The taped up window speaks to a kind of out-for-fun used car mentality. This was all I knew. Because the information available in this picture is rather plentiful, I was able to come up with what I think is a match. But I didn't want to spoil it for anyone who might read this post and want to comment. I haven't been on this forum for very long and only moments ago learned how to resize a picture. I have more to relate, so I am going to make a second comment as a placeholder because I think I can edit it after the fact and keep the story together. If this doesn't work, the rest of the story will follow somewhere below. I'll post it soon.

Interesting to see the hinge action, how the top collapses.

Good information and advice. Thx.

Something to explain how a car with 6 windows can be called a 5-window, I hope.

Thx, DLynskey, I had no idea about the fabric rooftops of pre-1934 cars. (It would probably be an impossible mission to find another '28 Martin Landau.) If the car at the church is different than the Chevy by the porch, it most likely wasn't my grandfather's then. He had the '23 Buick, and then this '29 (or '30) - his next car must be a late 30-something. The picture of the car at the church must just have been a picture of their church. Is there a catalogue-like list at AACA of body types with depictions of the differences? Phaeton, etc. Also for the parts of cars in general. I'd find that helpful.