Durham bus station, c. 1978. I drove these poppy-red beasts around the north east for two years before becoming a teacher. Two years’ work experience! And well worth it. You can read all about my time on the buses in my book “Bus”, available from Amazon (click here!)

Nearly half a century ago I was a bus driver.

Wow.

Can it really be as long ago as that?

Well, I’ve just celebrated my seventieth birthday, so perhaps I shouldn’t feel surprised that such a hefty chunk of time has elapsed since the events in this little memoir took place. It’s been strange, delving so far into the days of my youth. As L. P. Hartley put it— and I doubt if it’s ever been put better— ‘the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’. Taking a job at United Automobiles in Durham straight from the university, I certainly found myself in what seemed like a foreign country: the language, the customs, the whole way of life was utterly new to me; I quickly realised that I had a lot to learn, and not just about driving!

They certainly did things differently on the buses back in1977.

There were none of your eco-friendly hybrid vehicles then. When they started the thunderous diesel engines in the  morning the vast echoing cavern of the depot became like a scene from the Book of Revelation: ‘the house was filled with smoke’. Your eyes would stream with the fumes: but perhaps our lungs were inured to bad air— almost everybody seemed to smoke cigarettes in those days, and there were no health warnings on the ubiquitous packets of tabs.

Passengers used to pay for their rides in hard cash: there were no card payments because of course there was no internet and no smartphones either. If your bus broke down and there was no  phone box nearby you couldn’t call the depot; you just had to wait for the next one to come along and rescue you. 

There were no computers of course, and all administration and record keeping at the depot was done by hand. Black biros scribbled, typewriters bashed away.

There’s another sense in which the past is a foreign country: it’s difficult to get there. The only passport we have for the journey is our memory, and I have discovered mine to be far from trustworthy. I have a few souvenirs to help me remember— a few fare sheets, a notebook I made during One Man Operation training, some newspaper cuttings— but I’ve been dismayed to find how vague my recollection is when I make the effort to reconstruct incidents in detail. I’ve tried to re-live some of the routes I used to drive using Google Earth, but the roads have changed, sometimes beyond recognition. The old Durham depot has disappeared completely, and as I write they’ve nearly finished rebuilding the bus station. However, all the events in this memoir really happened, and I hope that my account of them will make a coherent and even entertaining picture of what my two years on the buses were like.

I apologise to any readers who are knowledgeable bus enthusiasts, such as Mr Ken Weaver— who very kindly allowed me to use his photograph of some of the buses I actually drove on the cover of this little book— for the lack of technical detail in my description of the various vehicles mentioned. I’m sure that when I was driving I could differentiate between a Bristol RE, an LH, a VR, and the rest; but I’m afraid they’re all mixed up and lost in the mists of time now. I’ve tried to fill some of the gaps in my memory with a little research, but transport history is a vast subject, and I think it’s best left to the experts!

N.T. June 2023

You can buy the book of my adventures on the buses (paperback or Kindle e-book) by clicking here!