Routemaster Riddle

It still seems slightly surprising that London Transport should stick with the Routemaster as the bus it would overwhelmingly buy, all the way to 1968, the year the last was delivered.

The first production Routemaster appeared in 1956. Yet, four years earlier, Leyland started to experiment with a rear engined double deck chassis design that eventually became the Atlantean PDR1. Conditions in Britain were not right for a rear engined double deck design until the very year the production RM was launched: 1956.

The maximum length for double decks increased that year to 30ft. This enabled a wider passenger door. Curiously, the arrangement was not designed for one-person operation, though it soon became evident such vehicles could be staffed just by the driver. The original design was instead to enable swift loading and alighting under driver supervision, while the conductor concentrated on taking fares.

The Atlantean became commercially available from 1958. Would this sort of design have better suited London, even for crewed buses? LT thought not. They liked the idea of an open platform at the rear, and ordered them long after such vehicles in provincial Britain were fitted first with storm doors and later came with driver operated doors immediately behind the front axle & engine.

So, was the RM old before its time? Quite possibly. But, who cares whether it was or was not, because it outlasted just about every other type of bus on London’s streets. They came and went, while the Routemaster reigned supreme. Remember these two?

DMS – Park Royal or MCW bodies Daimler Fleetlines new from 1971. Like the RMs, they were first purpose-built (in reality, purpose re-modelled) for London, though these were capable of one-person operation. They made an impression, a rather poor one, in fact, and LT started shipping them out from 1979, a year after the last arrived new.

AEC Swift & Merlin – Bought off the peg, these high standee capacity single decks preceded the DMS. Ordered in abundance in the late 1960s to reshape London’s transport, they were only purchased for about four years. Unreliable and unloved, they had virtually disappeared by the end of the 1970s.

Other London Transport-operated models that the RM outlived included Leyland Nationals, Bristol LHSs, Dennis Lances and Volvo B10Bs.