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Notes About This Vehicle |
| The life of what was to become a large fleet of RTs commenced just before the Second World War. The first such vehicles became known as ‘pre-war RTs’ though in truth this was a bit misleading with them actually entering service when the war had already started. |
| The engines, chassis and running units of the ‘post-war’ RTs were built by AEC with a four different companies building the bodies. The majority were from Park Royal Vehicles and Weymann, though others were supplied by Saunders and Craven. |
| The highest fleet number reached was RT4825 and these existed variously in red (central area), green (country area) and Green Line. This figure is a little misleading as a separate batch of 1631 similar buses was built with Leyland units and all but one with bodies from Park Royal and Metro-Cammell; these were separately designated RTLs. |
| The RT family conformed to the then standard legislation restricting them to 7ft 6ins width; the RTLs conformed too. When legislation later permitted 8ft-wide buses, further Leyland vehicles, bodied by themselves, were built to this width, with fleet numbers RTW1 to RTW500. |
| The first post-war RTs arrived in 1947 with progress severely hampered owing to extreme shortages of raw materials; the last was delivered into 1959. |
| Inevitably during this time body features developed. The front roof boxes were omitted from late 1948, with the knock-on effect that the front blind displays became wider, having to incorporate the route number and this meant that the adverts now wrapped awkwardly around the sides. |
| The pre-war buses had four upper deck drainage chutes on each side and, rather surprisingly, they were initially omitted on the post-war buses, however, in due course, two were fitted on each side. |
| Among other later features were the revised rear registration plate and arrow indicators, the addition of front ‘elephant ear’ indicators and removal of nearside and offside route number metal plates. Less conspicuous perhaps was the addition of a guard rail in front of the luggage compartment behind the platform. |
| Having previously been brush painted, as techniques improved, spray painted RTs started to appear in early 1950. To reduce the cost of extensive masking, the upper deck cream window surrounds were sacrificed. |
| The vehicle in this drawing is depicted as it would have looked after its 1964 overhaul. |
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Notes About This Drawing |
| The drawing is based on an undated Chiswick Works general arrangement drawing ‘RT0027’ (probably). This type of black & white sketch drawing, as implied by the name, is not intended to define detail but as a specification guide to builders. |
| All the fine detail has been interpreted from several black & white and colour photographs of sufficient quality that could be found. Owing to the age of the photographs, some fine detail has been gleaned from current preserved vehicles, though these are far from consistent. None of the detail can be regarded as definitive. |
| 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. |
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| © drawing copyright Douglas Rose – March 2018 |
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