One Door or Two—Pt 5

RC169 reaches the penultimate post in his survey of dual door buses in southern central England, looking at Southampton Corporation's somewhat ad hoc use of them...

Southampton Corporation

This brings us to Southampton Corporation. Again, an early trial in the 1950's with some of the Guy Arab LUF single deckers, with a similar configuration to Hants & Dorset’s Bristol LSs, but with standee facilities and fewer seats, was abandoned fairly quickly, and the vehicles converted to a conventional fully seated configuration with a single door.

As with H&D, a dual door revival occurred in the second half of the sixties with 10 AEC Swifts. These were 36ft long, and the dual doors to some extent followed the fashion of the day, but logic again seems to have been absent from the thinking, as deliveries of Atlanteans started shortly after the first Swifts, but these were all conventional single door 76 seaters. The doorway widths of the Swifts and Atlanteans were similar, so the potential improvement in stop dwell times with the Swifts must have been considerable - but to what point, given that they only had 47 seats (+19 standing)? Was it simply the extra length that justified an extra doorway? Again, not really logical, as the walking distance from most of the seats on the upper deck of a double decker to the doorway must be more than from the rear of a long single decker. In any event, the Swifts were not a success in various respects, and when further single deckers were required a couple of years later, 33ft long Seddon RUs were chosen, with single doors.

That wasn't quite the end of dual door buses in Southampton, as in more recent years, under First ownership, various secondhand double deckers from parts of the First empire have been drafted in to the fleet, including dual door examples from London (and elsewhere), but it does not appear to be part of a deliberate policy to introduce separate entrance/exits to the fleet. A few artics also operated briefly in Southampton for a while.

To be concluded...