Goodbye Routemasters.

Warning: reading of this passage by non-diesel-heads could cause terminal narcolepsy.

“What is a Routemaster?”, I hear you cry. After World War II and while the earlier model RT London bus was still in production, planning and the design began for London Transport’s next generation bus. It would be a hard act to follow. The RT had emerged in 1939 as the most advanced double decker in the world and 4,500 were built for London alone. So the RM had to be pretty remarkable and it was; no chassis, all-aluminium frame and body, engine and front wheels attached to a Y-frame which could be wheeled out for maintenance, and gentle coil spring suspension all round.
The first one hit the streets in 1954, and the last one ran in normal revenue service last Friday, December 9th, from Brixton Garage, on route 159, Marble Arch to Streatham Station. But Thursday 8th was to be the last full day of operation, and we were promised a raft of ‘guest buses’—i.e. visiting preserved vintage and veteran buses running in conjunction with RMs on the service.
So I planned to wake early and get in there before the rush, to get some good video footage. I rolled over looked blearily at my watch; 5 to 7; time for a brief snooze. Got up at 7.20, and looked my watch right way up: 10 a.m.— bugger.
-Race up to tube, emerge at Piccadilly Circus beside Eros to find traffic islands crowded with photographers and bus nuts.
-Plan was to be on the curve of Regent Street, to get the long view, and then good side views. Four lanes of city traffic meant cars and other buses got in the way.
-Went to Marble Arch to catch them standing over at the terminus.
-Hordes of bus nuts snapping everything red that came near.
-Being mainly out to catch anything really old, pre-WWII, to film, I hung out for some hours.
-Lots of service RMs from Brixton, looking very tired, faded, and battered, some dented, one with red gaffer tape holding something together on its black front mudguard, one with a crack in its bonnet patched with a square of metal pop-riveted on the outside. How the mighty are fallen.
-A couple of RTs, an RMC (a Routemaster in its coach version with power-operated door), an RTW (the 8 foot wide Leyland-built version of the RT) turned up, then a rego number I knew: SLT 56. It was RM1, the very first prototype RM, so lots of careful video shots of that.
Then---agony: to stay put and wait in hope, or go to Brixton and catch the action at the Garage? I knew as soon as I settled into an RM upstairs at the front I would likely see all the wanted vehicles heading the other way, and so I did; the Silver Jubilee RM, the Golden Jubilee RM (painted those colours for ERII’s career milestones), two green London Country RMs, and the London Transport Museum’s ST, an early 1930’s open staircase veteran. Bugger.
But lots of action at Brixton—RT624, the last RT to run in service in London, arrived, nearly boiling after the ascent of Brixton Hill—bit of a problem there—but they said it would do a return trip after 30 mins. I waited for that.
-Got busted trying to film with one foot inside the entry road of the Garage. Security is tight after the bombers’ visit, and today was no exception.
Now 5 PM and pitch dark, the ST had finished for the day and wasn’t carrying passengers anyway; just doing two return trips for the photographers.
However, I got 1.5 hours of quite good footage to edit up for a future Tempe Museum meeting night, and saw lots of London scenery, from Hyde Park and Marble Arch to Whitehall and Westminster, to Kennington and Brixton. The demographic equivalent of going from Macquarie Street Sydney, to Lakemba, but in a quarter of the time. Remember the Brixton race riots?
Hopped off the RT at Regent Street after a pleasant conversation with the bus nut seated beside me, and in 20 minutes I was home in Wood Green.
-One last thought: The Queen was crowned the same year Routemasters began service, and route 159 runs beside Westminster Abbey at one point.