Can anyone help with a question I have relating to LT body builders plates from RT and RTL buses? I recently rode on an RTL and noticed that the builders plate stated the fact that it was built by Leyland Motors! I have a plate in my possession from a RT and the plate has the legend WEYMANN'S on it ! I always assumed that they were ALL delivered in engine and chassis form and bodied by LT, a la Bristol and ECW. I am intrigued to know the facts, please help!
Dave Knapp
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15/10/14 - 07:25
Dave. Post-war (WW2) LT (or whatever they were called at the time) didn't build anything. Everything was contracted out - just as everyone else did - but in LT's case they had a very strict and unique specification.
RTs were the LT specification AEC Regent III and RTLs and RTWs were the LT specification Leyland Titan PD2 - in the latter case using many "AEC standard" parts to keep commonality between the classes. RMs were an LT design with structure by Park Royal, running units by AEC and a minority of engines also provided by Leyland.
In the case of RTs, the bodies were all "Jig built" to be (more or less) identical. The majority were supplied either by Park Royal or Weymann - and these bodies were fully interchangeable. There were also small numbers, some very small, by Metro-Cammell, Saunders-Roe and Cravens - all on AEC and not changeable. The final sub-set was the RTWs - 8' wide PD2s. These had Leyland bodies. All RT family buses were superficially and at first glance identical - and there were "tells" - but the RTWs were more obvious with their 8' wide bodies and different upper deck emergency window.
David Oldfield
15/10/14 - 07:25
London Transport ceased building bodies with the 'unfrozen' ones for STL's in 1942. Chiswick built these, in the main, from spare parts set aside when all-out war started with the Fall of France, putting them on 'unfrozen' chassis. The last bulk-built vehicles were the so-called pre-war RT's, spread out increasingly slowly, from 1940 to the last one's delivery in Jan/Feb 1942.
Chris Hebbron
15/10/14 - 18:24
I was always surprised, David O, how obvious that extra six inches was on RTW's. I can't recall any other vehicles being so obvious, save for the situation of having 8' bodies on 7' 6" chassis!
The Craven-bodied RT's were obviously different in all respects, but I preferred the Craven front profile to the standard front.
Chris Hebbron
16/10/14 - 04:25
Chris H - yes I agree with you, and no disrespect at all is meant towards the classic standard RT body shape, but I always found the Craven RTs to be absolutely fascinating in every way. They had a lovely shape, the five bays were very tidy, and the fronts were of a very distinctive and "familiar" form - also the interiors with their slimmer flatter window cappings appealed to me greatly.
Better take cover now as my RAF radar capability (constantly useful) shows a very angry advance lynch mob heading this way from 55 Broadway SW1 with reinforcements from Aldenham close behind.
Chris Youhill
16/10/14 - 04:26
One of the oddities of the RT saga is that having gone to so much trouble to design a standard vehicle, and given the planned maintenance regime for Aldenham and Chiswick, LT went to Saunders Roe and Craven and that the Metro Cammell bodies, given the tie in with Weymann, were not interchangeable.
True there was a delivery bottleneck throughout the industry in the late 1940s but the Craven bodies in particular were the height of expediency in an otherwise almost totalitarian system.
The RTs came to define London in the 1950s and the fleet remains the largest standardised fleet that any one operator has ever put on the road.
Phil Blinkhorn
16/10/14 - 14:28
I'm a great lover of the standard RT, Chris, but I'm also a Sheffielder - and therefore a Cravens man as well. I think they are beautiful bodies, if bizarrely out of step with the other 7,000 RTs. Likewise, it makes no sense that, cosmetically, the Saunders and Met-Camm bodies should be identical to the Park Royal and Weymann bodies and yet their structure should preclude the body fixings allowing the interchangeability that was presumably the whole point of the exercise. It does, however, emphasise that, until the '60s, Weymann and Met-Cam were distinctly independent and under different ownership.
David Oldfield
16/10/14 - 14:29
It's a commonly held myth that the Saunders RT bodies weren't interchangeable with any other body - they were, in fact, fully interchangeable with Park Royal and Weymann bodies on RT chassis, but not RTL. Of the eight Saunders-bodies RTs currently listed as preserved in the UK, only two started out with Saunders bodies. (See 'Ian's Bus Stop').
When it is stated that such-and-such a body was not interchangeable with such-and-such another body I suspect that what is meant is that it was not interchangeable 'using LT's standard overhaul procedures'. Bearing in mind that, over the years, operators have managed to fit virtually any body to virtually any chassis, fitting any RT/RTL body to any RT/RTL chassis should not have proved too much of a challenge. Indeed, if I remember rightly, one of the Cravens bodies is now on an 'alternative' chassis.
I suppose that an RTW body (8' wide) could have been fitted to an RT/RTL chassis (7'6" wide), but the converse wouldn't have been quite so easy.
David Call
18/10/14 - 05:19
The profligacy of the LPTB and its successors, the LTE and LTB, was ever a disgrace. In 1947/8 RT/RTL chassis production began to outstrip the bodywork supply, so London Transport hurried to Saunders-Roe and Cravens to make up the shortfall of bodies. The Saunders body was a very close reproduction of the standard Park Royal/Weymann design, though certain construction methods were different. Saunders-Roe were aircraft engineers and hence fully acquainted with jig built structures. Cravens supplied a cosmetically modified version of their own body design, that was, nevertheless, fully up to the quality of that from the other makers. These supposedly "non standard" buses arrived from 1948 onwards. Having adopted this course, LT almost immediately found the situation turning right round, with chassis production beginning to fall behind bodywork deliveries. In its 'wisdom', LT then decided to embark upon the costly and ultimately fruitless course of upgrading and modifying pre-war STL chassis to accept standard RT bodywork. The resulting class, coded SRT, entered service in 1949, and immediately proved itself to be a complete failure. The 7.7 litre 95 bhp engine and vacuum braking system were wholly unable to cope with the extra half ton or so of weight inherent in the RT body, and although a total of 300 was planned, production stopped after 160 examples of this aberration had been delivered. All had been taken out of passenger service by 1954. It would seem that, as much for public relations reasons as for engineering ones, LT, ever (and still behaving so as TfL) inward looking and dismissive of cost, wanted to flood London in haste with its new, modern looking post-war fleet. Never mind that under the skin some of it was actually rehashed machinery from the 'thirties. It plunged headlong into purchases without consideration for the longer term. In the event, by 1954, the demand for bus travel had begun to tail off, and the total production run of the RT/RTL/RTW classes proved to be well in excess of the capital's needs. A great number of the later deliveries spent much time in store, until the "non standard" Cravens and older standard examples had been sold off before their properly depreciated lifespan. By that time, having decided upon a course of trolleybus replacement, LT was embarking upon Routemaster production when it already had a surfeit of vehicles. Instead, the Craven RTs were sold off in 1956 and the older standard examples were disposed of from 1958 onwards. A more cost effective approach would have been the retention of the Northern Counties Guy Arabs until the mid to late fifties, and adjusting RT class orders more carefully over time in accordance with passenger demand patterns. It is true that pressures from the T&GWU, whose members detested the crash gearbox utilities, influenced the thinking on the seventh floor of 55 Broadway, but the ultimate waste was inexcusable. (And, of course, the same 'leap before you look' attitudes continued - the RC class Reliances, the Merlin/Swift saga, the DMS debacle, the Metro-Scania mistake, and latterly the ludicrous "Borisbus".)
Roger Cox
19/10/14 - 05:41
An excellent piece, as usual, from Roger. In honesty, should not the Titan be added to the list of failures? Meant by Leyland to be the double deck equivalent of the National, the design became so closely overseen by LT that it became too expensive and the engineering was not to the industry's liking. Craving the indulgence of our site owner and the readership, can anyone step out of our time zone and give a simple explanation of LT's strategy with the type or was it just a continuation of 55 Broadway's previous cussidness?
Phil Blinkhorn
20/10/14 - 06:54
I cannot agree with the notion that the Titan was a failure, except commercially. What seems to have killed its widespread adoption was disastrous industrial relations rather than any technical deficiency. From a passenger's point of view they were splendid vehicles, with excellent headroom and visibility, well-sited grab poles and a smooth transmission.
I was familiar with those in Manchester, where only 15 of what was meant to be an initial order of, I believe, 150 entered service. Whilst they did not have a long life in Manchester this was due to them being non-standard in a fleet at the time of deregulation, when a wholesale purging of non-standard vehicles took place. Some of them went on to run well over twenty years in service and I cannot equate that with failure.
David Beilby
20/10/14 - 17:05
David, blaming industrial relations for the Titan's failure doesn't stack up, given the success of the Olympian, the vehicle the industry bought in volume when Leyland listened to what most operators were saying they would accept.
Phil Blinkhorn
20/10/14 - 17:05
I couldn't agree more with David. I've said before that there is often a hidden continuum with vehicle models and development. With varying degrees of success Seddon, Ward and Dennis tried to fill a Bristol RE sized hole. The Duple 425, generally very highly regarded, was effectively a Dennis which morphed into the Plaxton/Dennis R series. This is one of the best coaches I've ever driven - but it failed commercially. Likewise, I've never heard a bad word from drivers or (post-London) operators about the Titan. Indeed, I would contend (heresy of heresy from an AEC man) the the Titan was the (eventual) production version of FRM1. None of this conflicts with Roger's comments on the profligacy of London Transport or the antics of Donald Stokes and his successors. The high specifications made the RT, RM and TN good buses and Leyland (NOT British Leyland) could produce the goods - as evinced by the ON Olympian and TR Tiger.
David Oldfield
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