AEC Routemaster: Books - History, Types and Construction

Routemaster Bus Manual - all marks (1954 onwards) - An insight into maintaining and operating

The Routemaster bus - instantly recognisable as the classic red double-decker London Transport bus - is a British icon, and a symbol unmistakably associated with London. Now the Routemaster receives the famous Haynes Manual treatment.

This book provides a unique perspective on owning, restoring and operating a Routemaster, as well as an insight into the design, development and anatomy of this remarkably resilient machine, which saw continuous service in London for over 45 years.

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London Routemasters in the Late 1970s and Early 1980s

The Routemaster is the iconic London bus, recognised around the world. This pictorial account features previously unseen pictures of the ubiquitous RM far and wide throughout the network during the period 1976-83, which included the year of the Queen's Silver Jubilee, when twenty-five of the type were specially painted in an all-over silver colour scheme.

By the end of this period buses formerly allocated to the country garages had mainly gravitated back to the central area, some of which saw further passenger service while others were converted to driver training buses.
It was also around this time that London Transport began to dispose of its RMs in significant numbers.

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Routemasters in Scotland - The Late 1980s

The deregulation of the bus industry in 1986 led to the formation of new bus companies in Central Scotland such as Clydeside, Kelvin, Strathtay and Magicbus (Stagecoach). These companies seem to have hit on the idea to use redundant London Routemasters and to provide conductors to speed up services.

During the next few years these were a common sight in Glasgow, Perth and Dundee and were duly recorded by the author. Some 240-odd operational RMs were involved, with over fifty additional vehicles for use for spares.
Most of the buses received a complete repaint by LT before being delivered to Scotland - and the new liveries were a sight to behold! This 'invasion' didn't last for long, though, and all this came to an end in 1990-2.

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Last Years of the London Routemaster

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The last decade of Routemaster bus operation in London saw over seven hundred surviving RMs and RMLs divided between several new companies following the privatisation of London Buses Ltd's subsidiaries in 1994.
Now operating their existing twenty routes under contract to LRT (renamed TfL in 2000), Centrewest, Metroline, MTL London Northern, Leaside Buses, Stagecoach East London, South London, London Central, London General and London United all adopted their own predominantly red liveries, but by the turn of the century these firms had clustered in pairs and generally sold out to the emerging big corporate groups.
Two independents, BTS and Kentish Bus, had also won a Routemaster route each and were similarly brought under the control of larger parents.

In this photographic archive, each company's last Routemaster-operating decade is outlined in detail up to when each route was converted to OPO one by one between 29 August 2003 and 9 December 2005. The two heritage routes are then explored all the way up to their own end in 2019.

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