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Saturday 22 November 2008

On the buses

Alan Judd goes Motoring

Boris would have approved. He might have been envious. He might even have remembered the lunch he owes me. But I’d have let him off that just to have seen his face when he saw me at the wheel of a Routemaster bus.

Since it is a vintage vehicle, an ordinary car licence suffices provided there are no more than eight passengers and no charge is made, and the drive is easier and yet more enjoyable than you’d think. With luck and the new mayor, we might see them on London’s streets again: Autocar has already reviewed an improved design that more than meets modern requirements.

Built in London for London by Londoners, they entered service in 1954, intended to last 17 years. When production ceased in 1968, about 2,875 had been produced, mostly the basic 27.5ft RM which was later modified to become the 30ft RML. In 1994 the entire fleet was re-engined and smartened up. In 2000 Transport for London (TfL) sought another 24 second-hand ones in which to install the latest low-emission, more efficient engines. The aspirant mayor, Ken Livingstone, promised to ‘get conductors back on buses’ and to retain the existing fleet until a modern Routemaster was produced. The man in charge of TfL’s buses said that they could refurbish and modernise three Routemasters for the price of one new bus. In 2001 Ken Livingstone further opined that ‘only some ghastly dehumanised moron would want to get rid of the Routemaster’.

That same year his new MD of Surface Transport at TfL, Peter Hendy, ordered the first of the £200,000 Mercedes Citaro bendy buses. In his previous post, as deputy director of First Group, he had reportedly overseen the adoption of the same bus in Manchester. By 2005 virtually all Routemasters had been withdrawn and sold off, save a few on tourist routes.

But such gloomy mysteries were far from my mind as I climbed into the cab of a freshly painted red 1966 RML one fine Surrey morning. The first thing that strikes you is its almost brutal functionality; like my 1966 Land Rover, this is motoring of another era. There’s the wide flat steering wheel before you, the high forked handbrake and stubby automatic gearbox selector on your left, a pleasingly over-engineered hooter on the right, a hand-sized round indicator switch with a point to show you where you’ve indicated, a speedo and a few switches for lights, heater, wiper and — an extra, this — an assault alarm. There’s no milometer or rev. counter and the warning lights are above the windscreen, enhanced by a mechanical arm that drops down in front of you and says STOP. The fuel gauge is a broomstick thrust into the 29-gallon tank from outside.

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