My Picture Archive Post 27

Stagecoach London 17751 on Route N8, Oxford Circus, 22/06/13

This may be just over a year ago, but the Dennis Trident 2/Alexander ALX400 ran riot across East London with Stagecoach for a very long time, until about 2006 when Macquarie Bank acquired Stagecoach London, and thus ELBG started ordering Scania Omnicitys. Just four years later, Stagecoach bought it up at a discount price of £53 million, making a significant amount of money in the process.

This specific bus was part of the batch that started the withdrawal of Routemasters from 'normal' London Buses service (as 15H is a special route), with it part of the batch to go to Bow for the 15. That fateful day - the 29th August 2003, started the last routes to still have Routemasters to be converted to OPO over three years, ending in December 2006 with Route 159. The withdrawal of Routemasters on the 15 ended just over 39 years of service of the Routemaster on the 15. This bus had since been repainted from Stagecoach swirls to overall red and is still just any old anonymous bus running across East London

Route N8 is the night service of Route 8, easy enough. It ran with the normal 8 between Willesden and Bow, but it also continued until Queensbury in the west until 1992, when along with the other major Central London changes, it was split. The Queensbury section to Trafalgar Square became N99 (the day equivalent became the 98) and the route was instead routed to Victoria. Eventually, the route was extended to Woodford Wells and Newbury Park in 1995, and diverted away from Trafalgar Square in 1999. At the time, splitting night routes at the suburban end was common, like the N25 (which oddly had both ends serve Romford) and the N9 (where there was a split between Richmond and Kingston). This continued until 2004, when the route instead replaced the N25 from Wanstead to Hainault, The Lowe. After the 2009 withdrawal from Victoria, and the temporary Crossrail curtailments to Tottenham Court Road/Centrepoint, the route now runs Oxford Circus-Hainault. The route was also converted to LT-class buses:


Stagecoach London LT253 on Route N8, Hainault The Lowe, 19/07/14

Obviously OPO. D'you really think we'd return to crewed night buses?