As far as local stage carriage services were concerned, from the 40s to 86, nobody would have taken any notice of duplicate buses being operated, or at what times. Many (most) companies had clauses on their road service licences allowing additional trips to be operated 'in accordance with demand' anyway. The only exceptions to this would be those few routes or part routes which were shared between state owned and private companies, where any endemic sharp practice may have been reported to the TC. Express/long distance services were a bit different, where BR were active in trying to reduce competition with their services. (The railway had long since given up worrying about competition by local buses).Certainly by the time I entered the bus industry in 1971 this requirement had either been done away with or was generally ignored. Taking the very large ex-BET companies as an example, neither Ribble nor Midland Red had Duplicate, Extra or Relief on the blinds at all, Ribble had no stickers saying this, or foldable boards etc, and I never saw one on a Midland Red bus at any time. Birmingham City Transport did have the famously unhelpful "Service Extra" destination, but growing up in Birmingham I always thought that this was mostly used where the actual terminal point didn't appear on the blind fitted to the bus in use (perhaps because of interdepot transfers, obsolete blinds, odd peak period workings by different depots). Certainly buses that must have been duplicates (such as the streams of Bank Holiday buses to/from Rednal for the Lickey Hills) mostly showed the true destination - or as close as Birmingham ever got to that since they showed the outer terminus of a route in both directions.
In the company that I started work with in '74, duplicates were almost always only working part trip anyway - it was rare to send a 'dup' the full route - on Wednesdays (market day)the 9.28 from X village to town would be 'duped' from Y because the service car would always overload. On Schooldays the 4.20pm from town to X was duped to Y. The 'dup' was loaded second but then ran in front. On arrival at Y any remaining passengers on board were transferred to the service car travelling behind. If, for some reason (sports day etc) the service car had plenty of seats at departure time, the 'dup' wouldn't go.
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