At precisely 6.25am on Sunday, March 27, 1977, the number 670 bus left Bradford’s new bus depot on Bridge Street to make the journey to Leeds via Rodley.

There was no one aboard the green and cream double-decker apart from the driver Thomas Carr and the conductor Derek Smith.

Thirty-six years ago double-decker buses still had a crew of two, though change was coming in the shape of new automated ticket and change-giving machines that drivers would have to operate.

But the big news of the day was the opening of the new bus station next to the railway station. The latter had been moved a couple of hundred yards across Bridge Street from Drake Street, behind the T&A building.

Exchange Station, with its double-domed roof that a young David Hockney had drawn, was deemed too big, so it was abandoned and bulldozed. Instead of being moved northwards closer to Forster Square station, it was shunted southwards to link up with the grand new bus station.

Bradford had its own Transport Interchange. More than that, the people of Bradford had “some of the best passenger transport facilities anywhere in the world,” according to Robin Ward, director general of West Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive.

The bus station cost £16.2m and was spread over an eight-acre site which, until October 22,1962, had functioned as a railway goods yard.

As though to demonstrate to future generations that Bradford was truly a place of modernity, the new bus station had a high roof made of 11,000 panes of reinforced glass constructed in a corrugated design, supported by more than 1,000 tons of steel.

The T&A reported that the building had been eight years in the planning, design and construction. It was roomy enough for 140 buses, half the Bradford bus fleet.

Of course the existence of this new super station meant the end of smaller depots at Horton Bank Top, Saltaire, Bowling, Duckworth Lane, Bankfoot and homely but open-air Chester Street, opposite the Alhambra. However, bringing the bus and railway stations together at the Interchange were to prompt calls for a cross-rail link between the Interchange and Forster Square station.

But instead of coming closer together, in the 1990s Forster Square was moved 200 yards or more further north to make way for a big Burtons shopping development that did not happen.

The bus station and its pretentious glass roof lasted all of 22 years. In 1999 the roof was dismantled and the entire bus station, with its peculiar grid of covered passenger corridors, was extensively remodelled and opened in 2001.

Since May 2010 Grand Central has operated a thrice-daily train service from the Interchange to London via Halifax and Wakefield.