The Last Conductor in the West
PART ONE: BEFORE
18 March 2023
A trip down memory lane for a change. Many bus enthusiasts have a 'favourite' route. My traditional choice of a favourite might seem an odd one, as London route 207 was, and still is, one of the simplest and most straight-forward routes there is. It runs more-or-less in a straight line, and I once heard someone suggest that, "if a driver can drive the 207 route all day without becoming terminally bored, they will be able to drive any bus route anywhere"!
The 207 was a trolleybus replacement route. In its traditional form, it ran between Uxbridge and Shepherds Bush - a dead-straight run of twelve-and-a-half miles down the Uxbridge Road in West London. On the way, it served Hillingdon, Hayes End, Southall (my home town), Hanwell, Ealing and Acton. There were one-way systems in both Uxbridge Town Centre and at Shepherds Bush, but otherwise there wasn't even a roundabout on the route to break up the monotony, until the Hayes By-Pass was built in the 1980s.
Route 207 was one of those to be allocated doored crew-Daimler Fleetlines between 1976 & 1980, in an attempt to improve services (it didn't work). Routemasters returned from August 1980, starting with the standard 64-seater RMs until enough of the longer RMLs could be made available. RM 1433 (433 CLT) only spent four months at Hanwell, and is seen here arriving at the Southall High Street stop, around August 1980.
The 207 and the Uxbridge Road corridor are extremely busy, and the route is, by far, the busiest in my area, and the only trunk route. It retained crew operation long after all other crew buses had left the area. So when the inevitable happened, and a conversion to driver-only operation was announced in 1986 (to take effect the following year), there was uproar.
Various pressure groups, spearheaded by the local newspapers and the affected councils (especially Ealing Council), launched campaigns to save "the last conductor in the west". Council motions were passed. Conversion to driver-only operation was clearly the thin end of the wedge, and would cause mayhem on the route for ever more.
But it has to be said that the service on the route had never previously been as bad as it was at that time. A combination of unrealistic running times and demotivated staff made it a very difficult period. Buses were frequently full for much of the way, and long gaps, followed by several buses at once, were a daily occurrence.
One evening, I caught a bus home from work in Acton Vale. When it reached Hanwell Garage, the inspector pounced on the conductor and said "where on earth have you been - you're nearly an hour late"! It summed up the problems of that time.
What made it interesting for me, as an observer, was the sheer variety of journeys across the day. In addition to the main termini, there were three scheduled intermediate turning points from the west (Acton Vale, Acton Tram Depot and Ealing Broadway), and two more from the east (Southall, Delamere Road and Hayes End), plus two others (Southall Town Hall and Hillingdon Hill) that were only used for unscheduled short workings (and not even counting Hanwell Broadway, which was exactly half-way along and was the location of one of the two garages for the route - the other was Uxbridge).
Hanwell inspectors were notorious for not seeing the bigger picture where service control was concerned, and no-one from London Transport seemed to think about that either. They controlled their own buses, but Uxbridge Garage ones were controlled separately.
On many occasions, Hanwell Garage buses would be turned short of Uxbridge due to late running, leaving only the Uxbridge Garage buses going through to Uxbridge. The only problem with that was that, at five / six in the evening, most of the Uxbridge buses were going out of service on arrival, and the Hanwell buses, which should have provided the service out of Uxbridge, weren't there. Waits of 45 minutes at Uxbridge (on a service that was scheduled at eight to twelve buses per hour) were commonplace at that time.
A typical parade of 207s, heading west down the congested Southall Broadway, on a Sunday afternoon in 1986. Southall Town Hall is visible at the back (right).
The announcement of the conversion to what was then known as One-Person Operation (OPO) came a few weeks before my 19th birthday. My bus interests were (of course) well known to my colleagues of the time, and many of them used the 207 as well as me, as we were working at that stage in Acton Vale. We all knew that driver-only operation was coming at some point...
Then, one Friday morning, my local rag was dropping through the front door letterbox as I was leaving through the back. If I had gone and picked up that paper before leaving for work, I would have seen the announcement on the front page, and it would have been a big scoop for me to share with my colleagues. But I didn't see it until I got home that night. By Monday morning, they had all seen the news as well!
An historic scene outside Hanwell Bus Garage - itself a distant memory - on Saturday 9th August 1986. A Metrobus is pulling into the garage on route 282 and is followed by a staff vehicle. A pair of RMLs await service on route 207. The one nearer the camera is RML 2462 (JJD 462D). Many of the RMLs brought to the 207 in the early 1980s had started life as green buses, but this one had always been red. This was the morning after nearby Southall Garage had closed its doors for the last time. The Hanwell Garage site, still recognisable, is now occupied by a Lidl supermarket.
I well remember the build-up to the conversion, and I took almost an entire week off work to watch it happen! London Transport and the local press were allegedly promising a fleet of "new 90-seat" buses to replace the Routemasters (the longer RMLs in this case).
But that's not how vehicle policy was working for London Transport at that time. This is the period when the midibus revolution was starting up in earnest. All sorts of unsuitable routes were being converted to midibus operation to free up older double-deckers, which in turn replaced Routemasters. The double-decker of choice for West London was the MCW Metrobus; the last new London Metrobus had been delivered in 1985 (although a special batch was still to come for the ill-fated Harrow Buses operation). "New" buses were not on the cards for the 207.
Nor were any 90-seaters available. The Metrobus sat 71 passengers (one less than the long Routemasters they would replace). But they did have plenty of standing room, so "buses that could carry 90 passengers" might have fitted.
Another row of 207s line up waiting to cross the Town Hall junction in Southall. Despite the fact that these buses are all Metrobuses, and that the front vehicle has a "Pay Driver" sign, this is actually the last day of crew operation, Friday 27th March 1987.
The change was scheduled for Saturday 28th March 1987, but the first big signs of the change came earlier in the month, when the Hanwell Garage share of the route (31 of the 46 buses allocated) was changed overnight to crew-Metrobus. Most seemed to have come from Wandsworth Garage and still carried their "WD" codes for a day or two. One or two RMLs were kept back, presumably for the last day celebrations (but see below).
Uxbridge Garage, which then ran 15 buses, kept hold of its RMLs to the end, but the Metrobuses started to appear there as well in penny numbers from a few days before the change. I made it my business to check how many RMLs were still out from Uxbridge on each day during the last week. The numbers diminished as the week went on, but it was just on the very last day that the number of Metrobuses tipped into the ascendancy - eight Metrobuses and seven RMLs that day.
MCW Metrobus M 1438 (C438 BUV) enters Uxbridge bus station on Friday 27th March 1987, with its reversible board correctly set to "Pay Conductor" on the last day of crew operation of route 207. Alongside is London Country Atlantean AN 154 (VPA 154S) on route 347, a service that had also seen RMLs at one time.
I made sure that I had a last ride from Uxbridge on an RML on the Friday afternoon, 27th March.
I remember dragging my Mum out at close to Midnight that night to see the last crew-operated 207 to Uxbridge go through. In addition to the official last bus, there was a duplicate service and an RT (the RT also worked on route 207 during the day). All three buses were very busy and I guess any 'normal' passengers trying to travel that night probably had to wait for the first night bus, which will have followed a little while after this convoy. (The night bus was still numbered N89 at this time, I think, but paralleled the whole of the 207 and became the N207 a few years later.)
RT 3314 (LYR 533) provided some extra journeys on the last day of crew operation on route 207. It is seen here in Uxbridge bus station. The website "Ian's Bus Stop" (http://www.countrybus.org/RT/RTa33.htm#fleet) notes that this bus was also used during 1986 on a publicity campaign against driver-only operation on route 207
The last Hanwell crew-operated 207 was a Metrobus! Hanwell Garage never did have a sense of occasion, but fancy not putting their last RML onto the working that would become the last one! The bus passed through Southall, on its way back to Hanwell Garage, with no ceremony and no special operations of any sort.
I have a recollection that the last Hanwell bus was supposed to have been later than the last Uxbridge one, but the last Uxbridge convoy was significantly late (I think half an hour or so), so finished later.
And then it was all over. The last conductor in the west had been laid off. Some of them retrained as drivers, one or two became inspectors, and one was my postman for a while. One, from Hanwell Garage, still lives four doors down from me!
But now the 'disastrous' driver-only conversion that the local press had threatened for so long was imminent. What would the Saturday morning bring?
Obviously my photos in this article are not as sharp as modern ones. I had to photograph the original photos! Most of the originals were taken on a Polaroid camera.