On Wed, 10 Jun 2009 15:35:18 +0100, "Tim Fenton"
wrote:


"Christopher A. Lee" wrote in message
.. .

I always thought of them as the Routemaster of the tube world!
I'd have said the RT. RMs were more the contemporaries of the 59 and 62
stock.

Mind you, the RT was still in production in 1954 (paradoxically, some of
these had OLD nnn numberplates).

This was actually a pre-war design - you could recognise the pre-war
from the post-war because the former had route-number boxes front and
back but the latter only had them at the front or not at all. We used
to see them occasionally on the local routes when I was a kid.

The pre-war vehicles were the 1RT and 2RT and ITYF they could be easily
distinguished by having a route number box above the top deck front windows.
The post war AEC chassis were 3RT, bodied by a variety of builders, but to
the same style.

Some of the post war RTs also had the route number box above the top
deck front windows. But the pre-war ones also had a similar box above
the top deck rear windows which none o fthe post war ones had.

Both the RT family (including RTL and RTW) and the RM family were long
lived, rugged and reliable vehicles many of which had an extended life
on provincial cities after withdrawal by London Transport.

Actually, many of the RTL and RTW (6RT and 7RT) got withdrawn at the end of
the 1960s and were cut up, which was a bit of a waste, but then there had
been over 4,000 built, and it wouldn't have been possible to find new owners
for all those. Leyland, as well as providing the chassis for these, also
built at least some of the bodies.

RMs were
the mainstay of of many of the independents athat sprung up after
deregulation.

There were two spells of RM operation in south Manchester, the second being
with an independent. The RM was a good vehicle for Wilmslow Road, but needed
a crew of two, and they were by now getting old.

I rode them in both Manchester and Glasgow, and saw them in other
cities.