Notes About This Vehicle

For purely practical reasons London Transport (LT) and its predecessors had a long tradition of converting buses no longer fit for passenger carrying duties into service vehicles and driver training buses.

Outside the LT area the National Bus Company (NBC) subsidiaries were deregulated on 26th October 1986 and the individual companies gradually sold off to form numerous competing private organizations. It is of note that the government did not have the nerve to deregulate the area of the London Transport Executive (to give it its full title), though it did replace it with a London Regional Transport (LRT) in 1984, in anticipation of separating the ‘authority’ aspect from the day-to-day bus and Underground operations. In due course London was broken up into many areas and the garages and vehicles were sold off to newly formed companies.

LRT became responsible for managing the bus network, in terms of dictating the actual routes and timetables, and its internal Tendered Bus Unit did what its name implied. The new private bus companies, including some management buyouts, bid to operate the services on a commercial basis.

Centrewest was one such newly formed company, based at Westbourne Park garage which it now owned. As with all the other new companies Centrewest created its own corporate identity, though LRT’s contracts dictated that all bus liveries were largely constrained to dominantly red and had to continue using its Johnston lettering for bus blinds and major public facing information.

This drawing depicts BL1 in its latter days with its blind boxes blanked out, dressed as it was as a bus driver training vehicle. The telephone number and fleet number were presented in the then current version of LRT’s rather heavy ‘New Johnston’ lettering. BL1 was withdrawn completely in 1997 and now forms part of the London Transport Museum collection.

Notes About This Drawing

The drawing is based on about 200 close-up and general photographs of BL1 and BL88, followed by extensive measuring of BL88. Reference to photographs of the buses when in service provided further detail for panelling and blinds.

It should be understood that all four elevations are seen here as one would see each part of the vehicle at a truly perpendicular angle. In real life this is of course impossible.