Hello All
I'm a new member here and having just read through this whole thread I am so sad I didn't join last year and find out about this event at YWBT. Having been born in Warstock (1947) I remember the place well. I live in Sheffield now, but I would have moved heaven and hell to get to the 70th celebration if I'd known about it. I so envy those of you who managed to get there, and who saw the bus that was driven into town and back.
Dave M, your camera has a real good lens and your compositional skills are excellent. I have drooled over your wonderful shots of these beautiful buses of my childhood. I confess if I owned the number 11 I would even take it to bed with me! Not only is it gorgeous, it also changed my life when, at 22 years of age I caught one from King's Heath, got off it at the Swan, Yardley, put my thumb out and immediately got a lift to London, and other lifts that took me to Dover, on to France and twelve more countries of Europe/Asia before coming back 5 months later, re-entering education and embarking on a whole new path in life.
I remember very well my period of "bus-spotting" (somehow more cool than the train-spotting everyone else did) around the south of Birmingham at the end of the 1950s/early 1960s. Me and my mates bought these hardback books that had all the series and their registration numbers in them, and we used to underline the numbers of all those buses we spotted. I wish I had that book now.
I know that once, a couple of us sneaked in to Yardley Wood Bus garage to get the numbers of some of the rarer vehicles, like the snow ploughs and repair buses they kept there, and though we had a couple of scary moments, wemade it out again without being detected. Another memory I have is seeing the first buses that experimented with hydraulic doors by after-fitting them onto the rear platforms - I think on to the number 48s (or might it have been a 49?) that, together with the number 50s, passed through King's Heath on their way to Warstock, Maypole etc. These first attempts were rather odd to look at because the new door sections seemed to stick out from the natural lines of the bus, and though I was excited to be among the first to 'spot' them, I remember feeling it was a shame that the old era of open platforms was going to end. Like hundreds of other schoolkids, I was very skilfull at jumping on and off these platforms and using the slingshot effects you could get from hands, inner elbows and the like, off the verticle chrome grabbing bars.
Ah what days, what days ...