"Jack Taylor" wrote in message
. ..

"Martin Underwood" wrote in message
...

True. Then again, it had become quite meaningless anyway with large-scale
commercial registrations or with garage chains registering vehicles in
their
head office area before shipping them to their salesrooms.

And of course there's the notorious dodge used by most coach companies: they
register their coaches in Northern Ireland which for some strange reason has
never adopted any of the ABC 123A, A123 ABC or AB05 ABC formats used by the
rest of the UK - hence their coaches don't bear any recognisable clue about
their age, to prevent the punters worrying about travelling on 10-year-old
(but imacculate) coaches. Take a look at the next few coaches you see, and
you'll see that I'm right!

I know the situation in Yorkshire better than Anglia: at one time UA, UB,
UM
were Leeds, YG was Bradford, CX was Huddersfield and HL was Wakefield.
These
were merged so that all these letters signified "somewhere in West
Yorkshire". I think the size of the region covered was further increased
with the new-style AA05 BBB numberplates. I'm not sure why they even
bothered to use new letters: the A123 BCD format had a two-letter
location
code (CD) so why not continue to use the same code in the new-style
numberplates? Methinks that they took the opportunity to rationalise
(merge)
some of the issuing offices at the same time.

Yes, Yorkshire is an oddity in the new system, in that the Yorkshire
registration district only covers South and West Yorkshire (YA to YO being
Leeds office and YP to YY being Sheffield office). For some reason East
and
North Yorkshire are lumped in with Teesside and Tyneside as the North
registration district, split into three offices (NA to NM at Newcastle, NN
to NT at Stockton and NU to NY at Beverley).

And of course so many cars have personalised numberplates these days that
you often cannot tell anything about a car's age or place of "birth".

It probably says something about my personality, but if someone offered me a
personalised numberplate I'd say no thanks: if a code exists, it seems only
right to use it and not to buck the system. Plus I don't want my car to
stand out from all the rest.

Whoever decided that '0' should represent March registrations and '5'
October? What happens if, at some time in the future, they decide to use
every month as a registration month?

I presume that this possibility was considered and rejected when the
numbering scheme was planned. The code that they've used is quite cunning:
for vehicles registered between March and September, the two digits are
always the last two digits of the year; for vehicles registered between
September and March, the two digits are always (year of the September) + 50.

I'd better shut up or you'll be thinking that I'm as obsessive as my mate
the walking look-up table ;-) Oh, too late...

I wouldn't dare suggest such a thing! Especially from someone who has the
registrations table saved in a Word document!! ;-))

Have a Happy New Year, Martin.

And you!

PS: I have to confess that I have all the STD codes saved as a Word
document, mainly so that if someone gives me a phone number I can tell
roughly where it relates to...