Fire ripped through a travel company's garage leaving two of its coaches destroyed and two other vehicles damaged.

About 45 firefighters from six stations were called to Castlefields Trading Estate, Castlefields Road, in Crossflatts, Bingley, at the peak of last night's blaze, which ravaged coaches at a warehouse.

The coaches belonged to Bingley and Wrose Travel Air, Bradford, which runs shuttle service to airports.

The flames were minutes from spreading to an adjacent tyre storage building but the crews managed to confine the blaze to the one building.

Sub officer Steve Brown, whose Bingley fire crew was first on the scene, said: "Flames were leaping through the roof of the garage by the time we arrived and the fire was in full flow.

"In a way this was a good thing because at least the heat and fire could escape upwards, otherwise they would have just spread along the garage.

"The two coaches were more or less destroyed plus the roof of the garage. A mini-bus and car suffered less damage."

The Bingley firefighters, on the scene just after 8pm, were joined by colleagues from Keighley, Idle and Shipley.

Sub Off Brown added: "The fire was about to spread to the building adjacent but, as we got there quickly, we managed to stop it.

"It was full of commercial tyres and if it had caught light we would probably have been there into the early hours of this morning.

"The actual fire took about 30 minutes to get under control, but we were there until about 11pm just damping down and beginning investigations into how it started."

The incident is being investigated by police and fire teams who were due to go back out to the scene this morning.

A spokesman for West Yorkshire Police said: "This is routine practice in cases where we do not immediately know what caused the fire."

A passing member of the public raised the alarm on a mobile phone after spotting the smoke and flames.

After tackling the blaze from outside using jets of water, four firefighters wearing breathing apparatus went into the garage.

Sub-Officer Brown said it was believed the blaze had started on one of the coaches.