Day Off - Er... Actually, I'm More Of A Leg Man Myself...

Day Off  -  Birmingham, by Vintage Bus

I think I may have timed this all wrong. If I’d waited another day to make the short hop from Coventry to Birmingham, I could have celebrated the 332^nd anniversary of Godiva’s naked ride through the city before I left. There might even have been a re-enactment or something. Rats.

Mind you, today is hardly auspicious as a day to travel as it happens to be the anniversary of the launch in 1911 of the RMS Titanic. So. I reckon it's best not to travel too far, then. 

The fact is, I couldn’t wait around in Coventry for another day because today is a Bank Holiday and bus services are thin on the ground. Also, it’s a rather special day if you happen to be a bus enthusiast living in Birmingham.

Britain's second city is graced - blessed, some might say - with no less than two transport museums, one near the Aston Villa football ground and the other out on the southern fringes of the city at Wythall. Today happens to be the one day in the year when the staff from both museums wheel out their best exhibits, dust them off, fill up their tanks with diesel and put them back into service for their annual Two Museums Day. This is an event which offers anyone with a fondness for old buses the chance to visit both museums on the same day AND to travel between them on vehicles you would normally expect to see in the museums. 

Part of me thinks that this is a little foolhardy, though. I mean, I’ve owned old vehicles in the past and I know how often they can spring surprises on you. Like the time I approached a roundabout at speed in my old Mini only to discover that, unknown to me, it had dumped virtually all of its brake fluid overnight onto my drive at home. Or the time I reversed my girlfriend’s Capri into a parking bay and the gear stick came straight out of the floor when I selected reverse. Or that time I drove that same car through what sounded like deep gravel but which turned out to be most of the front end of the car which had suddenly disintegrated into crumbs of rust …

Aston Manor... and that's just the car park

So, is it really a good idea to wheel out a 60 year-old bus pieced together by enthusiasts from parts salvaged from scrap yards, then fill it with well-meaning bus enthusiasts before setting off briskly down the road? Clearly, I was about to find out. 

I arrive at Aston Manor Transport Museum nice and early, though not quite as early as I’d planned. It took some time to find a bus as it is a Bank Holiday and the local bus company is operating what they called a Sunday service. This proves to be so sparse and infrequent that I wonder whether all their drivers normally attend church on a Sunday and they don’t run anything until lunchtime. But after a wait of 50 minutes or so, during which I make the acquaintance of Rafiq who is kind and helpful and makes sure I get off at the right stop, the bus finally rumbles into view and we set off for Aston Manor.

I find the museum in a tidy brick building with a sandstone plaque reading ‘Borough of Aston Manor Tramways Depot’ located high up above a set of four huge doorways. This had clearly been, at one time, a tram shed and therefore seems a wholly appropriate choice for a transport museum. To one side of the tram shed is a large car park which appears to be slowly filling with shiny old buses of all shapes and sizes. Some of these have clearly been brought out of the museum for an airing while the rest look to have been driven there by their proud owners. They make a colourful and mildly impressive sight. 

A new arrival parks up at Aston Manor

I look down the line of buses and find a rather stately Daimler double decker which I discover is owned by the museum. Having first taken to the streets of Coventry in 1963 it was ending its days rather ignominiously as a Birmingham Social Services playbus called Rodney when it was rescued by the museum. Today it looks as good as new. It is parked next to it was a pair of exotic-looking coaches, one a 1956 AEC with striking and glamorous coachwork, all curves and glass and polished aluminium, the other a racy-looking Eastern Scottish coach with windows sloping forward which make it look like it is going really fast even when its parked. Between them stands a quaint 1948 Bristol with a little glass cab at the front for the driver to sit in.

I make my way inside and discover that the museum isn’t actually open yet, though nobody seems to mind much. I’ve also come in the wrong entrance so haven’t paid my admission, which I promptly remedy. 

Aston Manor - with tram lines

“Can I have a ticket, please? Sorry, I seem to be a bit early and I think I must have come in through the bus entrance…

“Oh, that’s all right,” replies my new-found friend with the cash tin. “That’s not a local accent, though, is it? Where are you from?”

I’m impressed that he’s detected the slight trace of Geordie in my accent and I tell him that I’m from Tyneside and that I’m actually part way through a long-distance….

“Oh, really!” he interrupts. “I’m a huge fan of those Mark One ECW bodied Bristol REMH’s that United used to operate. You know the ones...”

Before I realise what's happened, I've find myself in the middle of a technical and highly detailed conversation about, I think, Bristols. Or is it Bristol? My new friend is clearly a devotee of whatever Bristol he is talking about, but I confess he's wrong-footed me and I'm slightly at a loss. He continues, extolling their configurations, waxing lyrical about their curvaceousness and blinding me in a fog of serial numbers, model designations and chassis types. And all within less than 10 seconds.

Aston Manor

Finally, he leans forward slightly and whispers confidentially “I love Bristols. I even used to live there once.”

To be honest, I genuinely don't know what he's talking about yet he clearly assumes that I am just as knowledgeable as him. Is he talking about Bristol the city, or Bristol motor cars, or an altogether different sort of Bristols (as extolled in some of the later Carry On films)? Or a well-known brand of sherry, perhaps?

Before I commit an inexcusable faux pas by telling him that Bristols are all well and good but that actually I was more of a leg man myself, it dawns on me that he is actually talking about the long-distance coaches I used to ride on when I was a kid. So I slip automatically into what us men refer to as Male Recovery Mode - I start to nod, smile and make a series of general "ah, yes... ah-ha, well now..." noises in a non-committal sort of way in a bid to keep him going whilst I figure out what the hell we are talking about.

Incidentally, and I probably shouldn't be giving this away, but this is a technique practiced by a great many men, though more commonly on their womenfolk. Blokes can find the "ah, yes... ah-ha, well now..." technique pretty useful for covering up the fact that while their wife is carefully explaining something terribly important about, say, next door's washing machine, they are instead thinking about what that weather girl off the telly would look like in just her underwear and a pink duffle coat. So when said wife then proceeds to seek the husband's perspective on next door's washing machine, he can use this technique to flannel about fairly convincingly for a bit whilst he picks up enough clues from his wife to make a reasonable stab at an answer.

C'mon, we've all done it...

Anyway, I finally figure out that my new friend is probably referring to the United Automobile Services coaches that I recall travelling on as a child between Newcastle to London, so after exchanging a few personal Bristol-related anecdotes which I'd hurriedly summoned up from my childhood we part on genuinely good terms. Nice guy. However, it was a close-run thing.

The museum has an extensive collection of wonderful old vehicles, most of them beautifully restored with a few carefully tucked away in shadowy corners awaiting restoration, insofar as it is ever possible to tuck a double decker bus away in a corner. It’s a special day today so there are also numerous stalls selling books and videos about buses, photos of buses, model buses, what is euphemistically termed ‘auto jumble’ and all manner of other bus-related items. This means there is plenty to look at but it also means you can’t really see the museum exhibits terribly well as the tables are laid out in front of them. Still, it looks and feels like a transport depot, there are tram rails embedded into the cobbles underfoot and there’s a pleasingly oily ambience to the place. I like it.

My bus to Wythall - a BMMO D9, no less

After a good poke about, I finally make my way outside to look for one of the free buses to Wythall and find a rather impressive double decker parked by the kerb. It's tall and rather grand, as bright as a post box and shining like a freshly-painted pin, but its filling up fast. I hurry along the pavement through a press of amateur photographers before leaping onto the open rear platform and making my way upstairs to grab one of the few remaining seats.

This, I later discover, is a BMMO D9 which entered service in 1965. It is dressed in the livery of Midland Red which until the 1980’s was one of the largest bus operators in the Midlands, if not the UK. The company could actually trace its roots back to 1905 and was very much its own company right from the start. By 1912 it had turned its back on horse buses and rolled out its first motor buses, yet the company weren’t altogether satisfied. They tinkered with them, redesigned them themselves, and when it was time to buy more new buses they took the unusual step of ordering just the chassis so that they were free to build their own bodywork to their own specification. By 1923, they had even stopped doing that and instead built absolutely everything themselves, and continued to do so until 1969.

For a while they used the brand name SOS which you might have thought would alarm their passengers, but apparently not. 

BMMO certainly weren’t afraid to try out new ideas. During the 1950s their engineers were among the first to experiment with integral construction, doing away with a chassis completely by bolting the wheels and engine directly onto the body. They also experimented with air suspension, glass fibre and disc brakes, and in 1959 unveiled a real fire-breather of a coach fitted with a huge turbo-charged engine capable of propelling passengers at 100mph non-stop down the newly-opened M1 Motorway between Birmingham and London.

The D9 I am travelling in today is not, I'm relieved to say, turbo-charged. It’s not unlike a Routemaster, I suppose, with a driver in his glass box at one end and an open platform at the back. I overhear someone explaining to his wife that the D9 was first unveiled in 1958 and that this particular D9 was one of the very last to be built. I enjoy its heady scent of fresh paint, leather and lino though I'm not sure his wife does.

“Smells a bit up here,” says another lady in front quietly to her husband.

I'm afraid she’s right. There is a mild but pervading scent of human body on the upper deck though it is not a particularly warm day. I look around and find myself in a largely male assembly, mostly older men in light windcheaters or heavily-patterned sweaters. There are small haversacks and flight bags a-plenty. And there are dozens and dozens of cameras.

So with a full and gently sweating load, we make our way through the streets of Birmingham at a surprisingly brisk pace for what is, after all, a fairly elderly vehicle. It’s pretty smooth, too, so much so that you might never guess that this was a bus consigned to the scrapyard several decades earlier. The only difference between our venerable D9 and a modern double decker seems to be that our's is a little slower going up hills, but not much.

Wythall's car park

After a journey of around 50 minutes, we make our way through the hedge-lined lanes marking the entrance to the Wythall Transport Museum. This is an altogether different proposition. Aston Manor Transport Museum seemed big, but Wythall is much bigger. The main purpose-built exhibition hall is carefully arranged by period – the 30's, the 40's, that sort of thing – and has lots of well-written and helpful information panels for idiots like me. It’s very professionally done. Outside there were two huge hangars full of buses, some in pristine preservation, others a lot less so. Many of the smarter vehicles are lined up outside and there seems to be bright Midland Red buses of all shapes and sizes almost as far as the eye can see.

And there’s more. The museum is also home to a large collection of historic electric milk floats, which I didn't expect, and today there is an exhibition of tiny and exquisitely-crafted model buses from a local modelling group. There was even a little steam railway in the grounds. And, in common with Aston Manor, there are plenty of trade stands selling all manner of model buses, books and videos, tickets, bell pushes, photographs, cap badges, and obscure mechanical items. 

One of the hangars at Wythall

The sun is out now, so after a leisurely tour of the site I find a picnic table in the grounds and settle down to chew on a sandwich. I am soon joined by a father and his teenage son and we fall easily into conversation over the cheese and onion crisps.

“How did you get here today?” asks the Dad.

“Oh, I came up from Aston Manor on that lovely old red double decker over there,” I reply affably. “Very nice ride, I thought. Pretty sprightly for its age, too.”

“Ah, well, that’s because the D9 was fitted the 10.5 litre BMMO engine and when you put that in a DD bodyshell, well, I mean… 

“Much better now they’ve got that old gardener out,” added his 13 year old son, knowledgeably.

Gardener? What - was he living in it?

Wythall's car park

“Oh, yeh. But did you see the DQ7 with the epicyclic linkage and the trimline styling earlier on? Coo, what a sight. That 9.7 litre transverse mounted sump housing was much too low. I mean, come on….”

OK, so I'm extemporising a bit, but you get the drift. It’s happened again. It began as a simple, innocent conversation but within seconds I am seriously floundering. 

It's perplexing. This lad is plainly still at school yet he seems to have a comprehensive and detailed knowledge of public transport vehicles of the 1950's and 1960's. How can it be possible to know so much about something that isn’t even your job? And why does everyone else assume that I know as much as they do?

After much nodding and tutting and the customary series of “ah, yes... ah-ha, well now...”’s, I finish my sandwich and back away slowly into the bushes.

“What, you going already? But we haven’t told you about the PD1/1R with the prototype flywheel we passed on the way up…”

I pick my way through the shrubbery and head back towards the car park in the hope of finding a bus to take me back to Aston Manor. I daren’t risk engaging anyone else in a conversation, and I find myself adopting that slightly detached and distracted expression that some people have come to associate with single male transport enthusiasts. It’s an eyes-averted, concentrate-hard-on-something-in-the-middle-distance look. Then I realise that virtually everyone else here is wearing the same expression and it finally dawns on me that maybe this is because they know as little about buses as I do and are desperate not to be engaged in conversation with the random minority of bus experts.

Inside one of the hangars at Wythall

Eventually I find an elderly Daimler double decker which is heading back to Birmingham and I climb aboard, though this time I opt for a seat on the lower deck so I can watch the driver being put through his paces in his cab up front. Immediately behind the driver’s cab are a couple of men talking in a language composed mostly of complex serial numbers and heroic Greek names. 

“… well, however good the Olympian was, technically the AN68 Atlantean was the real landmark.”

“No, no, not like the PDR1/1 was, but you can still give me a PD3/4 Titan any day...”

One of them has a video camera and is obviously intent on filming the whole journey back to Aston Manor over the driver’s shoulder. Or perhaps he’s just filming the driver’s shoulder. I can't be sure.

Even though our bus – a Daimler CVG6-30 with a Gardner 6LW 8.4 litre engine and the ‘Daimatic’ electro-pneumatic gearbox (hang on, I think I'm beginning to hit my stride) - is almost 50 years old, it is a superbly smooth ride, at least as smooth as some of the more modern buses I have used so far. It makes you wonder whether bus design perhaps hasn’t progressed that much in 50 years after all. 

Back at Aston Manor

And, damn it, it’s fun riding on old buses. I like sitting on leather seats, smelling the scent of hot oil from the engine, listening to the unfamiliar whirring and grinding noises from the transmission. It conjures up long forgotten memories of childhood, of days out to the seaside, of visits to the swimming baths. It’s social history brought noisily to life, it's alive and... well, I absolutely love it.

We arrive back at Aston Manor to find the road awash with bus enthusiasts. They are lined up on both sides of the road as a steady stream of stately, historic and immaculately turned-out buses arrive to disgorge happy passengers or load up with new ones. I keep accidentally walking into people’s camera shot, so even though its mid-afternoon I decide its time to head off. It’s been a thoroughly enjoyable day even if I am a little afraid to speak to anyone, but the journey to John O'Groats starts again tomorrow and, if I'm honest, I'm itching to get going. 

I’ve learnt an important lesson today, though. You should always have a care when speaking to any kind of enthusiast because unless you really, really know your stuff, I mean right down to chassis numbers and engine specifications and moquette variations, you might very soon get out of your depth. Like I did. 

Twice.

NEXT: Birmingham – Shrewsbury - in which I hurtle though the Shropshire countryside and finally appreciate why bus manufacturers put emergency exits in the roof. 

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Map courtesy of those awfully nice... oh no, wait, there isn't a map!