The Hindu : National : Routemaster rides into history

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Saturday, Dec 10, 2005

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Routemaster rides into history

Anand Parthasarathy

Iconic London double-decker and its clones still familiar to Mumbai

FIERCELY LOVED: One of London's traditional Routemaster buses passes over the Westminster Bridge ahead of the vehicle's withdrawal. — Photo: AP

Bangalore: The noon trip of London Transport's route number 159 from Marble Arch on Friday was the last one to be made by the city's most iconic symbol: the red "Routemaster" double-decker bus that first appeared on the scene 50 years ago.

In its heyday, the 1960s and 70s, almost 3,000 Routemasters with their trademark low-and-open rear footboard and the driver's cubby hole perched on top of the front-mounted engine, plied the British capital. Designed to last 20 years — and not manufactured after 1968 — they proved to be so rugged that they seemed to run on and on with minimal maintenance.

New safety standards that mandated closed doors and sensitivity to the needs of physically challenged passengers who could not clamber on board, wrote the Routemaster's death warrant in London. But for a generation of Londoners, the bus was a part of their growing up.

Practical and fun

Speaking to The Hindu , Andrew Dinsley, First Secretary (Trade and Investment), who heads the British Trade Office in Bangalore and had been a Londoner for over 25 years, says the design was both practical and fun. "You could hop on and if you felt brave you could hop off, particularly if the bus was caught in a traffic jam," he recalls.

"Above all you felt safe in a Routemaster. Women could travel late at night, secure in the knowledge that a friendly conductor was nearby. Today, in modern buses, there is no conductor and the driver seems to be in his own protected cocoon. In an emergency you cannot get out unless the doors are opened."

Mr. Dinsley and his wife find the Routemaster to be a part of many of their fond memories of outings, when it provided a cheap alternative to a taxi.

Interestingly, the floodgates of nostalgia for the Routemaster, mirrored by the U.K. media, overlook the fact that lakhs of Indian commuters too have reason to remember the double-decker with affection. And what is more, almost exact clones of the original London Routemaster continue to ply in Mumbai, where its trademark footboard has created a generation of commuters adept at leaping on and off and clutching the single steel pole.

In fact, double-decker buses came to India as early as 1937, when E.G. Salter, Assistant Operating Superintendent of the London Passenger Transport Board, became the Superintendent of the Travancore State Transport Department and imported some double-deckers for what was then Trivandrum. That same year they began to ply in Mumbai.

In the 1960s, some U.K.-built Routemasters found their way to India. Many of the Ashok Leyland red double-deckers used by BEST in Mumbai even today are close clones of the Routemaster, which plied alongside the original, but with one difference: they were diesel rather than petrol vehicles. Thiruvananthapuram, Kolkata and Hyderabad were other cities that embraced the double-decker, and still they are in use.

One of the original Routemasters was used in Kochi to service a single route from Palarivattom to Willingdon Island from the 1960s till the late 1970s. In a celebrated case, the courts, faced with an alleged defalcation of payment by the Kerala State Road Transport Corporation, ordered seizure of its most famous property — the Kochi double-decker — till the debt was cleared.

Clearly, the passing of the Routemaster in London is not the last chapter in the history of this fiercely loved bus: It lives on in India — albeit in a new avatar.

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