London Transport's Last Buses: Leyland Olympian L1-263

INTRODUCTION

London Transport’s L class of 263 ECW-bodied Leyland Olympians, comprising three evaluation and 260 production vehicles, brought an end to the pattern of yearly orders placed by that august organisation.

Solid, reliable and with the kind of timeless attractiveness that came with ECW’s bodywork, the Leyland Olympian ought to have attracted custom from London Transport almost as soon as it was unveiled to replace all of the Leyland Atlantean, Daimler Fleetline and Bristol VRT, but for LT’s persistence with the Titan. In fact, the Olympian was everything the Titan should have been from the outset, with the critical option of allowing companies to choose their own bodywork.

Not merely due to the massive upheaval inflicted upon the capital’s bus services in the 1980s, London Transport’s Ls were the last London double-deckers to achieve a full lifespan, operating for nineteen years where subsequent generations have struggled to manage two-thirds of that. About the only downside to the Ls was the tinkering with the interior specification that produced the inefficient and space-consuming straight staircases and the split-step entrance doors, which while well-intentioned in aim, ended up just being a nuisance. And quite why they deleted the foglights from the specification of the production vehicles will never be known!

Other Olympians, included those drafted into the L class by post-London Buses Ltd operators, will be covered in a future volume, as will the Volvo-badged examples that took over from 1993 with even more success than the original Leyland models.

Matthew Wharmby

Walton-on-Thames, September 2015

While all-red gave way to a variety of liveries as LBL gave way to the private sector, none was better than that carried by Plumstead’s L 136 (D136 FYM) between 1990 and 1995. It was commissioned to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the departure of Woolwich Corporation Tramways, the route of which had been inherited by the modern route 180, and the bus was kept predominantly on that route. Complete with chromed numberplates where the rest of the class was delivered with black-on-white reflective versions, L 136 is seen towards the end of both its spell in this livery, and of ‘London Transport’ operations as a whole, at Crystal Palace during a visit to the 122 in 1994. Bill Young

CHAPTER ONE

LONDON BUSES LTD

London Transport’s double-deck vehiclepurchase policy since the delivery of the last DMSs in 1978 had been to dual-source between Leyland Titans (Ts) and MCW Metrobuses (Ms). However, once again the development of both models outpaced LT’s insistence on standardisation and by 1982 both were effectively obsolete, the Metrobus superseded by a simpler Mark II version with 60% fewer parts and the Titan unable to garner sales outside LT due to prospective operators’ having been put off by the delays caused by continual industrial action. While both M and T classes had been successful both in reliability and operating costs, LT was still wary of entrusting its future needs to one manufacturer, so decided to evaluate four contemporary chassis, three examples of which would be run in on a single route. As well as Volvo Ailsa, MCW Metrobus Mark II and Dennis Dominator, LT ordered three ECW-bodied Leyland Olympians for delivery in the spring of 1984. This had been Leyland’s rather belated response to the realisation that operators did not want integral buses; overly complicated to engineers, the Titan had also prevented local bodybuilders, whose opinions were still important by then, from devising their own coachwork for various needs. Even so, the Olympian retained the Titan’s centralising goal in that it replaced the Fleetline, Atlantean and VR, which were all ageing. ECW’s Olympian body was particularly attractive, coming in two heights, two lengths and with two choices of transmission and engine. London Transport chose ECW’s full-height model to the shorter of the wheelbases offered. To be coded L 1-3, the first one would be Leyland TL11-engined with Hydracyclic transmission for additional comparison with the Gardner 6LXB/Voith D851 combination of the other two.

LT’s Ms and Ts came under the umbrella of ‘second-generation’ OPO buses, and it was their contribution that needed to be improved upon by whichever AVE class was determined cost-effective enough to order after 1986. They carved out essentially separate spheres, broadly colonising west London (Ms) and east London (Ts) and never worked together other than under experimental conditions at Sidcup and Westbourne Park. The former trial, encompassing route 51, is demonstrated at Orpington station by Sidcup’s T 550 (NUW 550Y) and M 800 (KYV 800X). Stuart Boxall

The ECW-bodied Olympian was a most attractive vehicle with clear lineage from the Titan, just with softer edges to the inevitable ‘box’ shape. Nearly thirty years on, the design can’t be said to have aged at all, but then again neither did previous ECW bodies, which seemed to just go on for years and years, migrating from front-engined to rear-engined chassis with barely any changes at all. One departure from LT standards as experienced on the Ms and Ts led to ECW’s standard staircase, albeit in the central position opposite the exit door. This eight-step corkscrew was harder to negotiate than the 1½-bay efforts on Ms and Ts, but allowed for another row of seats – unfortunately, making the upper deck distinctly cramped; even the author, 13 at the time and not blessed with height, felt this! A year after entering service Stockwell’s L 2 (A102 SYE) stands at the Roehampton terminus. Haydn Davies

Olympians were already familiar in London, at least on its outer fringes; London Country had taken an order for thirty Roebodied single-doored examples in 1982, the first of which took over from LT on its route 84, and fifteen each followed in 1983 and 1984. Outwardly identical to ECW’s bodywork, Roe’s body had a major difference in its flat, peaked windscreen which didn’t sit quite so well on the otherwise subtly curved lines.

Although the Alternative Vehicle Evaluation (AVE) trials, as these were named, were initially to have been carried out by Cardinal District, plans were altered so that the route chosen would be one both to have experience of nothing newer than DMSs and to incorporate a mixture of central-London and suburban running. This was firmed up as Stockwell’s 170, linking Aldwych and Roehampton with a convenient PVR of 12 buses. On Sundays, when the 170 did not run, Stockwell’s three-bus allocation on the 44 would be the testbed, and at night they would run on the N87 (crew-operated until 13/14 April 1984).

Mindful of the intent to cease Titan production after the 1984 order, which would bring stocks of that chassis up to 1125, LT placed an extra-large order for 335 Ms to be delivered in 1985, by which time it was hoped that the results of the AVE trials (scheduled to conclude on 31st August of that year) would be known in time to place a volume order for 1986 and thus ensure a seamless handover. What LT couldn’t have realised at the time was how completely events would change, which would wipe out not only the established pattern of yearly bus orders, but not much more than a decade later, London Transport itself.

Constructed with a centre staircase and to dual-door configuration, Ls 1-3, registered A101-103 SYE, seated 75 (H47/28D) with 16 standing. At 31ft 4½in long and 14ft 2½in high, they had a wheelbase of 16ft 3in and weighed 9,826kg unladen (though L 1 weighed 9,906kg). They introduced two features hitherto unseen on London-spec OMO buses; back-to-back seats over the rear wheelarches where side-facing benches had been the norm, and a side blind box carried at the bottom of the nearside window rather than at the top (as on Ts) or in a housing above it (Ms). The chassis having been built at Workington at the end of 1983 and then transported to Lowestoft for bodying and painting in January, the buses were delivered to LT on 24 January 1984 and sent to the Chiswick experimental shop as the first of the AVE vehicles to arrive.

Even after thirty years the original type of London Transport L, all three of which survive, feels modern and attractive. This montage is of L 2 (A102 SYE), which operated for LT, LRT, LBL, South London, Cowie South London, Arriva London South, Connex Bus, Travel London and before coming to preservation. Disregarding the anachronistic green handrails, applied in the early 1990s in conjunction with a LBL-wide programme, it can be seen that little inside the Ls’ lower deck differed from the Titan; they had the same brown surfaces and orange seats, after all, but one critical difference lay in the back-to-back seats fitted over the rear wheelarches. This was a bad mistake, it was felt, rear seat passengers just using the seats opposite to rest their dirty shoes, while the necessity to stare right into the face of one’s opposite number was a strict no-no in the famously reticent capital, where a wrong look could, under some circumstances, and certainly in the parts of town that the 170 traversed, prompt violence. However, the effective increase of capacity as compared to side-facing seats rendered this a permanent feature of London buses thereafter. Upstairs there was little need for improvement upon the Titan other than the frameless rear exit, which allowed in a little more light, and the single-bay staircase, which would prove a little too narrow for accepted standards. All: Bromley Bus Preservation Group

The AVE trials, and the L class’s debut into LT service as a whole, commenced on Monday 26 March with L 1. L 2 entered service on the 29th and all three were in service by 2 April. Throughout the rest of 1984 and into 1985 the 170 received the rest of its AVE types while continuing to use DMSs and even fielding some LSs made spare from Red Arrow routes and wandering from the P4 at Stockwell. The trials continued until 31 December 1985, but the Ls could be said to have ‘won’ them early by virtue of the placement on 5 June of an order for 260 more for 1986 delivery. As Titan production had ceased in November 1984 and the shortfall filled by increasing the order for Ms for 1985, two factors dictated this; first the need for an order for 1986 and second, more ominously, that the structure of ‘London Transport’ had started to change dramatically. Taken over from the GLC as London Regional Transport on 29 April 1984, the unified body was compelled under the London Regional Transport Act of 1984 to separate its operations as wholly-owned holdings, the bus-operating arm becoming London Buses Ltd (LBL) with effect from 1 April 1985. With the prospect of competitive tendering threatening to undercut its services under the banner of cost reduction, the last thing LBL could think about now was developing an advanced future bus design to the extent envisaged by the Ogle design consultancy of Letchworth, with whom a contract had been placed in 1985 to ponder design changes based on recommendations principally by disability advocacy groups.

After the enduringly strange rear end of the Titan, the ECW-bodied L’s rear aspect was far more conventional. One nod to advancement was the frameless upper-deck emergency exit, its hinges set into the glass. Points off for the odd offset of the blind box in relation to the centrally-positioned numberplate, but it was perfectly possible to have had both offset to the nearside so that a full-width bill could be posted; a rear blind at all was a luxury that operators outside London rarely bothered with by that point. This July 1984 shot is of L 1 (A101 SYE) in Putney Heath. David Wilkinson

The passengers’ contribution to the future of the Ls, and indeed of all the AVE classes, was in the form of a poster that invited comment on each, but for the technical questions which would have greater weight in carrying the day for one of these types, monitoring equipment was carried downstairs, its gauges monitoring air brake pressure and oil temperature. L 3 (A103 SYE)