London Banter - View Single Post

MIG · February 4th 06, 09:23 AM posted to uk.transport.london

Colin Rosenstiel wrote:
In article ,
(Ken) wrote:

On Tue, 31 Jan 2006 02:51 +0000 (GMT Standard Time),
(Colin Rosenstiel) wrote:

In article ,
(John Rowland) wrote:

I saw a bus today with the registration "VLT 47". Its fleet number
(or whatever they call them) was "VLW 47". I wonder why they were
able to get a reg so close to the fleet number, but not the same?
Or, for that matter, why they tried?

It's a re-used Routemaster plate, originally applied to RM47 in 1959
or thereabouts.

There are quite a lot about, helping to conceal the age of vehicles.

But in the case of many of the LT ones (VLT, WLT, CLT) they predated
year letter suffixes of prefixes. I think that these plates were a
sort of vanity plate, indicating ownership. This was in the days when
you couldn't normally buy personalised number plates, but LT got all
sorts of dispensations in this as in various other matters.

The LT series was allocated to the LCC. Of LT buses, only the RMs used
them in any quantity though and only for the first 1600 RMs (apart from
RM1000).

A few years ago (or maybe ten) Routemasters started appearing without
their original numbers. Some that would have predated the year letters
were given A reg plates for example. (None of them originally had A
reg; they went straight to B reg at RM 1866 [ALD866B]).

I could understand that, because plates on the lines of VLT47 might
well be sellable as "vanity" plates.

But I've never understood why so many old Routemaster reg numbers ended
up on modern buses. Maybe it was that the vanity business was so
lucrative that LT had to make sure that they kept all such valuable
numbers on registered vehicles, eg if the bus was just scrapped the
number would become available for free? But is there a cost in
transferring the number to a different vehicle?