David Sheppard reports on the ongoing ‘Bus Inspectors’ project to grade the nation’s historic buses and coaches
When you crack open the bus version of Top Trumps this Christmas, forget comparing the number of ZEBs in your fleet. There are more than 10,000 heritage buses and coaches in the UK and they have surprisingly special powers…
As you’ll know if you have a heritage bus in your real-life fleet, they are time machines. Those involved in restoring and maintaining vintage buses find themselves constantly travelling through time from one dimension to another, via all the little distractions that history can offer. Museum curators, doting depot employees, society volunteers and private owners are drawn back to the past by research into how their old buses used to be. Old photos capture the essence, while fantastic resources like The Bus Archive in Droitwich hold historic records that tell us about the fine detail, right down to materials and paint codes. Don’t wince! It’s surprisingly immersive stuff. Armed with bags of history, the challenge for preservationists is then to travel back to the present day and re-create the look and feel of their bus for their contemporaries to enjoy.
But despite the love we have for time travel, there’s one dimension that’s becoming problematic for the heritage bus world. Typically, the movement has been shy about considering its future. It’s perhaps no wonder why, when we start to look at some of the many issues it will face: loss of skills as generations pass, including heritage maintenance and driving skills; increasing pressure on resources such as storage space and spares; availability of fuels, and legislative restrictions on the road-use of historic vehicles (for many heritage organisations, especially charities without publicly accessible premises, taking the buses out on the road is crucial to their mission); and, fundamentally, competition for interest among younger generations, who seemingly aren’t as enthused by the older vehicles as those who are passing them on.
What do we do?
The grim list continues with daunting strategic challenges for a movement that, quite understandably, is much more motivated by bringing on back the good times. Frankly, many preservationists are having too much fun to wonder what happens next, and while the going is good, who can blame them?
But there’s now a tacit acknowledgement among serious players in preservation – museums, trusts and other organisations which have been formed for the long-haul – that the ongoing evolution of the nation’s collective heritage bus fleet may be brutal. Not every vehicle that is currently preserved will be able to survive in perpetuity and, indeed, we are already seeing some key examples of the nation’s bus heritage being lost to export, dereliction, conversion to cafes or even scrap. Many of the issues we’ve quietly been fearing are no longer over the horizon or round the next bend, but are now on the road beneath us, and the movement is being forced to break silence.
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