96 The London Bus
I
n 1939, London
Transport was well
on its way to having
a standardised fleet
of modern buses
that had been built to its own
highly individual and detailed
specification.
London Transport had been
formed just six years earlier
in a move to bring the UK
capital’s bus, tram and sub-
surface railways into common
ownership. With roundly 6,500
motorbuses, 600 trolleybuses,
2,000 trams plus the railway
companies that together formed
the Underground, this was the
world’s largest urban transport
operator.
With such large fleets,standardisation is essential. So
as quickly as London Transport
was clearing out its inheritance
of non-standard buses, it was
designing new types that were
suited to London conditions.
This mainly meant double-
deckers and with types developed
by its predecessor, London
General, as a base it placed
around 2,600 of its STL type
in service between 1933 and- These were based on the
AEC Regent chassis, built at
Southall in west London and the
close relationship with London
Transport meant that AEC could
justifiably claim — as it said in
its advertising — to be Builders
of London’s Buses.
As the 1930s drew to a close,
against a backdrop of the threat
of war with Germany, AEC
and London Transport had
developed the RT double-decker,
a dramatic step forward both in
mechanical and design terms,
and the prototype was placed in
service just weeks before war
was declared; between 1939
and 1941 a further 150 were
produced before the pressures
of war led to a temporary halt in
the production of ‘prewar’ types
and a move by the government
towards creating simple no-
frills utility buses that would
be allocated to bus operators
throughout the UK on the basis
of need.
Which is why London
Transport found itselfLives after London
ABOVE: London
Transport Guy
Arab II G171
operating from
Barking garage
around 1950. It
has a Northern
Counties body and
was delivered in
June 1945 around
a month after
the war ended in
Europe. It went
to Scotland in
1951, sold to
Alexander’s, and in
1961 became part
of the Alexander
(Fife) fleet.
F. G. REYNOLDS
Guys go to Scotland
When postwar deliveries allowed London Transport to dispose of non-standard
wartime double-deckers at the start of the 1950s, 189 of them went north of the
border where major rebuilds made many of them unrecognisable