For anyone interested in old buses and public transport (when these were run by your local authority or PTE), this is a really useful site, quite safe and no need to join in order to view the thousands of bus photos on view.

http://www.sct61.org.uk/

I watch this guy he repairs old greyhound buses plus few others with detroit diesels fitted .

Bus grease Monkey

On a trip to London a couple of years ago, we discovered that they still run original Routemasters on one route (15 I believe). I'd forgotten how noisy and uncomfortable they were!

I'm also a few miles from the Midlands bus museum at Wythall which regularly runs old buses on the road.

Was Reg Vardy from " On the buses " driving ?

'Twas the No. 13.

ITV's On the Buses comedy series together with couple of spin-off films, were I think quite funny, at times cringe-making, and hardly likely to be re-run in the current social climate. The bus that Veg Varney (who died just a few years ago, aged 92!) occasionally drove was the classic Bristol Lodekka with Eastern Coach Works body, an entirely British design widely supplied across the U.K from the mid-1950's. I would be very surprised if anyone on Maxi Muppets aged over 40 has not ridden on one at some point in their life. They were actually built in vast numbers, far exceeding London Transport's Routemaster production of which very few were sold outside of London. Some Lodekka models survived in Scotland (where they were particularly favoured by crews and management alike) well-into privatisation and deregulation. In the comedy series the buses were supplied by Eastern National Omnibus and still in their green livery as the fictional 'Luxton & District'. The films had used the earlier Bristol KSW model - a traditional half-cab double-decker with its origins in the 1930's.

My interest in all of this? Well, apart from a general interest in old transport, when I was in 4th year junior school, around 1970, I wrote an article for the school magazine reviewing 'On the Buses'. Another boy in the class reviewed 'Dad's Army' which was on TV at around the same time!

I think it hardly surprising that few Routemasters were sold outside 'of' London since they were designed specifically for London as were some of their predecessors.
Had it not been for the idiot Barbara Castle it's possible that subsequent buses would have been designed and built for the capital.
As it was, when she forced London Transport to buy buses from other manufacturers - effectively, LT built its buses in-house - there was no end of trouble; the Leyland Atlanteans which replaced the RMs proved useless with constant breakdown - mostly overheating - since they were unsuitable for the rigours of working in London.
The utterly stupid and dangerous Red Arrows didn't last long, either; I remember seeing many of them stored in the car-park at Finchley Central Tube station.
In more recent times, idiot Livingstone forced bendy-buses on to the long-suffering commuters. He was told they were totally unsuitable but he wouldn't listen. My pal, a former bus-driver, became a route-controller and had to deal with them. Fortunately, they didn't last long. If LT had been allowed to carry on designing and building its own buses this sort of very expensive fiasco would have been avoided.
I was there.

Never rode on a lodekka. I'm over 40 as well.

London did have some good buses after the DMS. They were the MCW Metrobus and Leyland Titan. Lasted in London for nearly a quarter of a century. They were the buses of my youth.

I rode on low-deckers when we had holidays in Margate although I didn't realise at the time why they were like that.

The rear-engined buses that followed the Atlanteans benefitted from the disasters suffered by them.
The trouble was that, apart from the fact they were fundamentally unsuitable, the drivers were unaware when the engines began to overheat. One may argue that the buses had temperature gauges but the drivers were too busy to pay attention to that. The driving position on RMs, RTs and previous LT buses was beside the engine so the drivers were aware of overheating and other engine problems and shut down before any damage was done.

“I hate you Butler”……