Leeds City Transport

[cnosni]

would it not be a good idea to reintroduce the conductors on buses.Apart from speeding the whole process up of getting passengers on and the bus moving but it would also mean increased safety for passengers on buses.If a bus driver is on his own and trouble kicks off then hes stuck.If there is a conductor he has someone to help out.This would mean that people would feelmore comfortable using the bus,and would therefore encourage more people to use the bus.As we are clearly not going to get a tram system (Unlike Edingburgh who just happen to have as mp for Edinburgh South West constituency a certain Alistair Darling,the same man who said that our tram would not be value for money and then went on to allow funding for phase 3 of the Manchester tram to be announced on the first day of the Labour party conference there last year) then surely we must,as a city and county,be looking at buses to do the job(and i dont mean them bloody guideway buses,should have made them into a bus lane that operates in the direction of traffic at the rush hours of the day,into town on a morning and vice versa on an evening)If they were more frequent,given traffic priority and i felt more secure then i would use the bus.Bring back condutors!

[weerdboil]

this is an administrative image test

[jf]

The new buses on the No. 4 route have conductors - although they're called something cringeworthy like 'customer service representatives'. It does speed things up as they can take fares while the bus is moving.

[Loinerpete]

Sorry to laugh but that comment about taking fares while on the move made me smile. Its amazing how things come back isnt it.

[Penz]

I hated seeing 'Yorkshire Rider' on the side of Leeds buses and every time I see a 'First' or 'Ariva' bus driving around the city I have a great feeling of resentment.IMO Leeds should still have LCT. The LCT buses in the proper livery, dark green with a light green band, travelling around the city were as important to the identity of the city as the routemasters were to London.THINGS I REMEMBER ABOUT LCT.Travelling on the trams. AS a small boy a tram was very exciting.I think I remember LCT buses being blue, changing to green in the mid 50's. Some of the green ones still had blue seats. Am I right?The top deck on a cold, rainy morning full of smokers, mainly men in wet raincoats, coughing and spluttering on their way to work in the factories.The ding ding of the bell and the conductor calling "Fares please", the whine of the gearbox as we accelerated and the squeaky brakes as we stopped. I remember the first ones to have a 'sunshine roof' which was orange perspex roof windows ... probably around 1960.And the first one man operated double deckers in 1964 0r 65. I was lucky enough to live at Seacroft and on the No. 11 bus route. Seacroft Town Centre had just been opened and we got the city's newest buses. No. 101 (Reg 101LNW) was amazing for this era. A Daimler with wrap-around windscreen and double headlights and superior seating.I say bring back LCT.            

[amber]

Couldn't agree more. Never been the same since Blakey and I left.

[Trojan]

Penz wrote: .I think I remember LCT buses being blue, changing to green in the mid 50's. Some of the green ones still had blue seats. Am I right?         I can just remember them being blue - and yes after they were painted green many of them still had blue seats. I used to call the ones with green seats (wait for it!) "green seaters" well I was only about 5.I also remember the many "Duplicate" services that ran from Morley. That's belongs in things you don't see any more I suppose.

[D A Young]

Green buses with blue seats.The change from blue to green buses was between 1950 and 1951.Buses with blue seats and a blue interior were in service en-masse until the mid-1960s. The last few were taken out of service in March or April of 1971. A very few continued as driver-training buses (with L-plates) for a year or two longer.Top deck with smokers-I was a conductor in the summer of 1964 when LCT took on a bunch of us students temporarily. The 72 to Bradford ran from Infirmary Street then. My first trip as a conductor on that route was on a hot July afternoon. I made sure all windows on the smoky top deck were wide open before the passengers got on, just to clear the air.By the time the bus pulled away, they were all shut once more and an almost-full top deck of passengers coughed and spluttered their way to Bradford. Amazing how many of them were in raincoats as well, happily sweating away.The orange perspex windows in the top deck ceiling I remember as first appearing on buses delivered new either in 1962 or 1963.But am I in the minority when I say I like the purple slugs now on route 4 and perhaps elsewhere as well? For example, they've been in service in York as well for a few years. I'm hardly a regular rider on them, not now living in Leeds, but they seemed OK to me on the couple of trips I've made. So why are they so disliked?And I like the idea of a conductor on board.And I'd like the idea of bringing back municipal ownership of many of the city's utilities. It may not have been the most fiscally efficient way of running these necessary services, but what might have been gained on the balance sheets (and that's questionable) has been more than outweighed by the loss of civic pride suffered by all cities in the North, now longer responsible for anything much that they do without approval from and a cheque signed by the central government.For one thing, we'd have had Supertram up and running this past five or more years.D. A. Young

[Terrym]

Hi all,I count myself really lucky as I joined L.C.T in March 1974, a couple of weeks before everything changed to WYPTE.As a conductor I well remember the old back loaders. Great to work on in summer but long days in winter.The big thing for me was becoming a driver in August 1974 and getting the chance to drive the old back loaders.The pre-select buses had gone by then but we still had the A..E.C. Regents, Daimler CVG 6, and of course the Leyland both with tin front and also the open radiator type.My greatest day of all was having a newly repainted Leyland PD3 on a teatime peak duty. The bus had just come out of the paintshop and was gleaming, I felt so proud.Working in the bus industry today I have to say that buses do not seem to have the character they had 30+ years ago.Whilst passenger comfort is looked after, driver comfort and space is getting worse. Ask anyone who has driven a new Plaxton Primo and they will tell you space in the cab to even hang your bag is non existant. Slightly off track I had the chance to drive our companies Routemaster buses in Scarborough on various occasions a few years ago, and I have to say they were a pleasure to drive.

[simong]

D. A. Young wrote: Green buses with blue seats.But am I in the minority when I say I like the purple slugs now on route 4 and perhaps elsewhere as well? For example, they've been in service in York as well for a few years. I'm hardly a regular rider on them, not now living in Leeds, but they seemed OK to me on the couple of trips I've made. So why are they so disliked?D. A. Young There are quite a few reasons: for one, First have advocated them as an alternative to trams, which misses the point somewhat as they're still diesel powered as opposed to electric and the point was to reduce emissions at street level. In addition they are very limited in the services that they can run: the 1 and the 4 are the only bendy bus services in town because on other routes there are potential issues with their turning ability - I think they found similar problems in York, and that's not just the width of the city streets, but in other places in the suburbs.West Yorkshire was very quick to dump its municipal bus services when deregulation came, literally handing them over to Yorkshire Rider on deregulation day: compare this to South Yorkshire, who retained their service for several years, initially as the owner and then as a management backed buyout (which ultimately got sucked up by First).Where the borough still has investment in the transport services they actually work pretty well: Nottingham retains its City Transport Department and runs its buses and trams very successfully, and Edinburgh's Lothian Buses are very good. However, business has the bus services of most of the rest of the country firmly in its grip, and no government will ever change that while they believe that they have to keep business happy. The best that we could possibly hope for would be a stronger Metro that can subsidise services and actually have some say in how they're run: I particularily enjoy being on a 33 or 33a when it runs out of fuel for example - last Saturday at midnight at Menston station being only the most recent - yet it's something that First have been castigated for repeatedly over the five years that I've used the route, and nothing changes.