Martin Rich wrote the following in:


From personal observation as a passenger - mostly on the 19 - a
majority of Routemasters still have the original type of gearbox.
This is an automatic, but left to its own devices seems set for
rather relaxed driving, and in particular always starts in second
gear. First gear (out of four) is only available if selected
manually. In practice most drivers seem to use these in
semi-automatic mode. The gear selector in these works in an 'H'
gate, much like a manual gearbox.

snip rest of post

Thanks for that very informative post! It answered a lot of questions I
had.

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