London Banter - View Single Post

Colin Rosenstiel · February 4th 06, 02:37 PM posted to uk.transport.london

In article .com,
(MIG) wrote:

*Subject:* Strange bus reg
*From:* "MIG"
*Date:* 4 Feb 2006 02:23:55 -0800

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]).

That's because they extended back to 1957 the vehicle ages to which A
registration suffixes applied. They were running short of remaining
series without year letters.

AIUI most of the Routemasters that left London for further use elsewhere
left without their original plates. Therefore many of those that came
back after 2000 didn't have them.

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?

Bus operators like to use old plates to conceal the age of vehicles. The
Routemaster plates form one of the largest series of such plates that
survived for such use. The second tranche of Park and Ride double
deckers that Stagecoach introduced in Cambridge had ex-RM plates
applied. This hid the fact that they were originally N prefixed while
the earlier Park and Ride series buses were P prefixed.

They can't be used again at all where vehicles have been scrapped, I
thought?

--
Colin Rosenstiel