Europabus leaflet 1980 (Cover and part of page 5)

Europabus was a network of coach routes controlled by the Railways of Europe. Unlike Britain which had a countrywide coach service network most European countries did not have such networks and their railways provided trunk services fed by more localised road services. It was difficult for coach operators to set up point-to-point scheduled services like those that exist on the Eurolines network and other services like Flixbus today.

During the 1950s a small number of services were established between key European tourist centres which were aimed at travellers wanting the freedom to create their own itineraries.

In this extract from a 1980 Europabus leaflet a service from London (England) to Athens (Greece) is shown. (I don’t know for certain but I don’t think this was a through service and may have involved at least three different coaches - London-Dover/Folkestone; Oostende-Munich; and Munich-Athens).

Departing London on Friday evening the arrival in Athens was Tuesday afternoon. The first part of the journey was from London to Munich (Germany) taking around 23 hours. Passengers then stayed overnight in Munich on Saturday night. On Sunday travel was to Maribor (Yugoslavia/Slovenia), a journey of about 10.5 hours. On Monday and into Tuesday the journey continued Belgrade (Yugoslavia/Serbia) reaching Thessalonki (Greece) early Tuesday morning and and Athens mid-afternoon.

The northbound service departed Athens at mid-day on Thursdays arriving London on Sunday morning.

In later years the London-Athens route marketed by Eurolines involved coach travel to an Italian port connecting to ferry services for the onward journey to Greece.

(Note at bottom left that the leaflet was ‘Published by the British Railways Board’)