Fifty years after the last working example was retired from public service, MICHAEL DRYHURST recalls a unique route number feature that distinguished many London Transport double-deckers built for the streets of the capital between the 1920s and 1951.
It started back in the mid-1920s, when bodybuilders to the independent bus operators in London sited the route number box in the front dome, leading exponents being Birch Bros of Kentish Town and Christopher Dodson of Willesden.
The style was followed quickly by the ‘combine’, the Underground-owned London General Omnibus Company, which applied the feature to batches of its LT-class AEC Renown and ST-class AEC Regent doubledeckers.
Successor to the General was the London Passenger Transport Board, which at its formation in July 1933 inherited from the General a new proposed standard doubledecker, the STL. This had a 60-seat body on the two-axle AEC Regent 661 chassis, but no roofbox.
London Transport continued to refine the rear-entrance STL body until it evolved in 1936 as a handsome 56-seat design, its styling enhanced by a roofbox. There were 994 roofbox STLs built over the next three years, as well as 100 Leyland Titan TD4s with Leyland bodies built to…
