Off the buses
It’s March, it’s raining and I’m at a bus stop waiting for that mythical beast, the on-time bus, to show up. And then looking about as incongruous in East Finchley as a Ferrari in Victorian London there comes chugging out of the mist that transport of delight… a 65-year-old red Routemaster. And everybody loved it, apart from me.
In the weird world of nostalgia, if something hangs on for long enough we all forget why we were pleased to see the back of it the first time round. And yes, I mean the Routemaster. It first appeared in 1956 and had its heyday in the 1960s when they built more than 2,700 of them. By 1970 London Transport had realised that there were better buses out there that were more comfortable and didn’t have a leap-on, leap-off platform at the back.
It wasn’t that it hadn’t been modern once, what with power steering, an automatic gearbox and brakes that worked, it’s just that times changed. When the Routemaster first lumbered onto the roads, Ford had just launched the Anglia, a slow cramped mini Americana with non-working brakes. By the time the last Routemaster retired in 2009 the Anglia’s equivalent, the Ford Focus, looked good, went better and didn’t try to kill you.
Ancient relic
But there are still people out there who love restoring something horrible from the 1950s, spending more on their ancient relic than the rest of us spend on something that works. And I blame steam trains.
Back in the days of boys in school caps and short trousers, men in hats and rationing, all trains were steam trains. They were usually cold, uncomfortable and smelt of smoke and soot. They weren’t delayed by leaves on the line because they tended to chuck out so much burning coal that you had to have a 10-foot scorched earth policy around it so that the thing didn’t set the fields alight. Maybe if you travelled first class on the Flying Scotsman with waiter service and all the luxuries, it was all cool and very Art Deco, but for the rest of the population train travel was never champagne and oysters.
After lagging behind countries like France and Germany who went electric in the 1950s, British Rail got rid of the pollution specials from their fleet in the 1960s and trains got cleaner, quicker and better. The rest is just schoolboy myth. It’s the same with buses.
After a slow, uncomfortable crawl into Muswell Hill on the 2024 Routemaster, I walked over the road and got a warm, comfortable modern bus back. Nostalgic dreams of steam trains and double-deckers are fun, just like pre-decimal coinage, pounds and ounces, chimney sweeps and Mary Poppins. It’s just that the rest of the world has moved on. After a slow, uncomfortable crawl into Muswell Hill on the 2024 Routemaster, I walked over the road and got a warm, comfortable modern bus back. Nostalgic dreams of steam trains and double-deckers are fun, just like pre-decimal coinage, pounds and ounces, chimney sweeps and Mary Poppins. It’s just that the rest of the world has moved on.
