The Last Conductor in the West
PART TWO: AFTER
20 May 2023
I wrote a few weeks ago about the period in March 1987 when London Transport bus route 207 (Uxbridge to Shepherds Bush) was converted to what was then known as One-Person Operation (OPO). For the not-quite 20-year-old me, this was a big deal at the time.
My first article talked extensively about the period leading up to the last crew buses, which ran on Friday 27th (or more accurately, in the very early hours of Saturday 28th) March 1987.
Having seen the last buses through on the Friday / early Saturday, I decided that I did not need to drag myself out of bed to see the first OPO service, which was due out of Hanwell Garage at something prior to 4.45am. I ventured out at a more reasonable 9-ish to see what was going on.
A fuzzy picture from the first week of driver-only operation on route 207 in March 1987. A sizeable crowd is waiting to board this MCW Metrobus, which is terminating at Hanwell Broadway - half-way along the route. It's a lunchtime picture, so it's not the time of day where it is a scheduled finish at Hanwell Garage. It might be terminating there because there isn't a relief driver, or it might be a late-running Ealing Broadway service. This is Uxbridge Bus Station, where buses at this time picked up right outside the garage entrance. A Leyland National is parked on the left. These were in use at the time on routes 98 (Uxbridge to Hounslow) and 204 (Uxbridge to Hayes)
It didn't look that much different, to be honest. As the majority of the Routemasters had left a fortnight before, I was waking up to a world with OPO MCW Metrobuses, where the day before they had been (mainly) the same vehicles, but with conductors.
I went into Uxbridge that morning and it quickly became clear that those drivers who had been rostered onto the 207 from Uxbridge Garage that day were the butt of the joke amongst their colleagues. Whenever a driver working the 207 passed one of his or her colleagues on another (local) Uxbridge route, the driver of the local service would make some kind of gesture or movement to the 207 driver (think Nelson Muntz from The Simpsons, with his "ha-ha" trademark laugh). It was clearly a running joke that the first day of route 207 without conductors would not be a pleasant experience for the drivers.
Another very poor photograph of Southall High Street shows how the convoys of crew days (see Part One) continued into OPO times. There are three buses in evidence on the westbound service. I believe this picture was taken on Saturday 28th March 1987 - the first day of driver-only operation. The building on the extreme left is the old White Hart pub, since demolished. The building behind the pub is Southall Police Station. A residential tower block on the pub site means that the Police Station is no longer visible from this angle.
Before the advent of Oyster, the first day of any conversion to driver-only operation was always challenging on any route in London, and presumably this was the same in any big city. Drivers were busy getting used to having to take fares for the first time, or they were new to the route and were learning the roads they had to traverse.
Delays were common-place whilst everyone settled into the new arrangements, including for those who had not realised that they now needed to have their money ready when the bus came along. Convoys quickly built up, even on relatively low-frequency routes. As the 1980s progressed, the routes for conversion were no longer quiet backwaters, but major trunk routes like this one.
The first day actually worked reasonably well. I suspect the Shepherds Bush end of the route was tricky, as half of the Shepherds Bush service that afternoon was turning short at Acton Vale, due to late running, but the bits I saw, generally west of Ealing Broadway, coped well.
I think it's fair to say that London Transport threw a lot at this change. It had to go well. An extra eight buses were allocated to the route (peak vehicle requirement 54), and sufficient extra running time was built in to replace the rather over-ambitious schedules that had been in place before.
And things did settle down. The disaster that the local press had been predicting did not occur, and things gradually got better. Some of the worst things in the period before the conversion - in particular the dearth of buses out of Uxbridge after 6pm (see Part One) - improved drastically.
Metrobuses were a mainstay on route 207 for more than a decade. In early 2000, the first low-floor buses arrived - a batch of Dennis Tridents with Plaxton President bodywork.
In early 2000, brand-new First London TNL (Trident-Long, these were 10.5m long rather than the 9.9m length of earlier deliveries elsewhere in First's territory) 899 (V899 HLH) is parked outside Uxbridge Garage. It was one of a batch of 43 such vehicles introduced between February and Summer 2000 to replace the Metrobuses, and represented the first brand-new buses to arrive for the 207 since the ill-fated DM class Daimler Fleetlines in 1976.
The busy nature of the 207 meant that it was a shoo-in for Bendybuses when these became popular in London. It was the first and the last route to operate these (see my earlier article here).
I won't go into the whole history of the route, but suffice to say that it now has two younger brothers - the 607, an Express version that was introduced in 1990, and the 427 route, which was introduced between Acton and Uxbridge in 2005, when the 207 was pulled back to Hayes By-Pass and those dreaded Bendybuses arrived. The 427 was really only formalising the overlapping sections arrangement that had been in place since the 207's OPO conversion in 1987.
From late 2011, after more than six years of BendyBus operation, route 207 was operated with Scania OmniCity double-deckers - the only such vehicles bought by First London and amongst the last-ever of the design to come off the production line. The route has been extended, from 2008, to serve the Westfield shopping complex at White City. SN 36062 (YR61 RVA) is approaching the stop at Dormers Wells Lane, east of Southall Town Centre, on Tuesday 24th July 2012. There are more people than usual standing around in this area because the London Olympic Torch Relay is due through.
I took a selection of photographs in 2014 when the local Council decided to dig up Southall Broadway, closing it to westbound traffic for over four months. The 207 was suspended between Southall Park and Hayes By-Pass, and the other services were re-routed over residential roads that the 207 had never previously seen the like of!
Two years on and First Group has quit London. Metroline West is now running route 207, using the same Scania Omnicity buses. Now renumbered into the Metroline sequence, SN 1951 (YR61 RVC) is turning out of Avenue Road, Southall, into Southall High Street, to start another journey on route 207 towards White City. It's Monday 11th August 2014, during the period in which Southall Broadway was closed to westbound traffic for major rebuilding work.
Not permitted to run to their normal terminus at Hayes By-Pass, route 207 terminated at Southall Park for over four months in 2014. Schedules were adjusted to reflect the shorter route, but even so, there are five 207s parked up outside the park on Saturday 29th November 2014. The route was officially restored to Hayes By-Pass a week later, on 6th December, although it was a further six days after that before the road was actually re-opened to allow buses back to their normal terminus.
The closure of Southall Broadway to westbound traffic led to the diversion of route 427 (and 607 at certain times) via rather tight and unsuitable residential roads. This is VW1819 (BV10 WVP), a Volvo B9TL Wright Eclipse Gemini 2, turning out of Beaconsfield Road, Southall, into Trinity Road, on Saturday 29th November 2014. The background is the Southall Gas Holder, since demolished. This is a photograph that I wish I had sent somewhere for possible publication - it's one of my favourites! And finally, after eight-and-a-half years, it's been (self-)published!
Route 607 diverted at certain times from Southall Town Hall via Lady Margaret Road, Ruislip Road and the Hayes Bypass to get back to line of route at Hayes, The Grapes, adding about 20 minutes to the journey time in the peak hours. Here, Metroline VW1565 (LK55 AAU), a Volvo B7TL Wright Eclipse Gemini, turns out of Southall High Street into Lady Margaret Road, on Saturday 29th November 2014.
And the two pictures below bring the story up-to-date. In March this year the 427 was dropped between Acton and Southall and diverted instead to Southall Station, and on into nearby Merrick Road - the nearest turning and parking point available. This has turned it into something of a stub - a shadow of what it used to be.
I have to say that the new routing has drummed up some business - I had expected buses to be broadly empty over the new half-mile section but that isn't the case. But it's noticeable that many no longer board the eastbound services from the Hillingdon and Hayes areas - presumably because the bus no longer goes to Hanwell, Ealing or Acton.
The new stretch of route 427 that was introduced in 2023 is demonstrated by the current operator, Abellio London. 2560 (YX17 NVG), an ADL Enviro400H MMC, has just turned out of Merrick Road, Southall onto the Station hill, on Sunday 19th March 2023.
And the diversion of the 427 meant the loss of one-third of the service between Southall, Ealing and Acton (16 buses per hour now instead of 24). And the remaining services struggle at times, especially when the Elizabeth Line goes wrong (which it does frequently at the moment).
But the 207 route is still doing broadly the same as it did when it took over from the old 607 trolleybus in 1960 (and that in turn took over from trams in the 1930s). There was talk in the early 2000s about building a modern tram along the Uxbridge Road, but that never happened.
Conductors are now a distant memory - they have been gone for 36 years. But, as you can tell, I can still vividly remember the day they went!
Route 207 is also run in 2023 by Abellio London, using a mix of hybrid Enviro400H MMCs and classic E400s. One of the former, 2518 (YX15 OWG) is heading down Southall Broadway on Saturday 20th May 2023.