London Banter - View Single Post - Sad day for London and farewell to faithful friends

Acrosticus · September 4th 04, 12:03 PM posted to uk.transport.london

From: Paul Corfield
Date: 04/09/2004 10:34 GMT

I did manage some photos at lunchtime and I rode home on FRM1 - the rear
engined Routemaster - and that was great fun with many ordinary people
out and about taking pictures of their local buses complete with unusual
visitors.

Ah yes, dear old KGY4D! Consider a few "what ifs?" and imagine what London
might be like today if:

(a) Leyland hadn't taken over AEC and then deliberately scuppered the FRM
project (after only one had been built) so that it wouldn't compete with the
Atlantean and Fleetline (which were both sacks of ****e anyway in my opinion);

(b) the government hadn't dragged its feet for so long in the 1960s before
allowing driver only operation of deckers, which was the obvious USP (unique
selling point) for rear engined vehicles like FRM1.

With a fleet of a few thousand FRMs, built to the usual Park Royal standards of
Routemaster robustness (anyone remember seeing an exasperated employee at
Wombwell Diesels trying to break up a Routemaster using an orange peel grab
fitted to the jib of a crane? It was on a documentary about "Routies" fronted
by John Peel several years ago. The bloke couldn't pull the roof off so he
started picking the entire body up and slamming it back onto the ground. This
broke most of the windows, but it didn't significantly deform the body shell.
The poor lad had obviously got too used to smashing up MCW bodied Atlanteans or
similar flimsy rubbish and couldn't understand why this particular "Routie" was
being so stubborn about the whole business!) the basic body structure would
have been sound almost forever, it would just have been a question of upgrading
power packs to "greener" ones from time to time, and "frying tonight"
articulated vehicles would have been left where they belong; in the
unenlightened conurbations of mainland Europe.

If the FRM project hadn't been killed off by a combination of Leyland's desire
to fix the market in favour of obviously inferior products and a 1960s Labour
government's apparent fixation with maintaining full employment, even if it
meant giving people meaningless jobs to do, I think we'd have seen rear engined
Routemasters in service in London until perhaps the middle of this century.

Finally, a couple of interesting asides. I remember pretty clearly the demise
of the RT (because I'm an old fart), but I don't remember that being as much of
a cause celebre as the death throes of the RM seem to have become today. Has
anyone else formed the same impression? Also, the demise of trolleybuses, which
the RM was originally designed to replace, is just within the span of my memory
(because in fact I'm a very old fart!) and my dim recollections of that are
that they were here today and gone tomorrow without any farewell parties or
other razamatazz. Does anyone else think that was the case too, or has the
passage of time dulled my memory?