Picture Archive Post 79

London United ADE40401 on Route N9, Turnham Green Church, 27/07/2017
(© Aubrey Morandarte)

ADE40401 started out as ADE1 with London United, ordered for the 81/120/222 contracts as London United's first deckers under RATP ownership. These buses, based at Hounslow (AV) ended up being one of only two batches of diesel Enviro 400 ordered by London United. These buses rarely strayed outside the daytime routes, and the 222 night service when it was introduced. Until 2017, when the ADEs started to run on the N9 for the latter part of that year only. During this time, the 120 and 222 was earmarked to move to Metroline, and allocations seemed to have relaxed. This bus then moved to Edgware (BT) for Route 258, when that route was gained on 30th September 2017. This bus is currently still at London Sovereign for the 142/258.

Route N9 was introduced in 1992, running between Trafalgar Square and Kingston, via Ham or Teddington, replacing the southern end of the N92 and the full route of the N65. Originally, Stamford Brook (V) operated the route, but moved to Hounslow (AV) in 1994. In 1997, the route was extended to Aldwych in order to correspond with the day 9. It also saw the withdrawal of the Ham services, with a night service returning to Ham with the introduction of the N65 in 2002. September 2001 saw the N9 be rerouted at Hammersmith to run to Heathrow Airport Central, replacing the N97 which had ran to Heathrow since 1978. This led to the blinds of the then-new Volvo B7TLs allocated to the route to have all except one via point (Hammersmith) blanked out on the blind. Thus the blinds had less information than the subsequent blind sets the buses received.

The opening of Heathrow Terminal 5 saw the route extended there in 2008. With the extension, the route had journeys on Sunday mornings finishing at Heathrow Terminal 5 at 0815hrs, which excluding the temporary N5/N20 Northern Line replacement services, were the latest finishing journeys of all night routes in London. By 2012, the Volvo B7TLs had been replaced by Scania OmniCity double deckers (SP) from Route 111, which was the solid allocation on the N9 until 2017, and continues to be the allocation until the 25th January 2019.

From the 26th January 2019, the route will return to Stamford Brook (V), losing the bulk of early journeys and late journeys and the N9 no longer will have journeys past 0700 on any day. LT class buses from the 9 allocation will also be used on the route. The route will finally start interworking with the day 9, as the losses of routes 120, 222 at Hounslow (AV), H32/H37 gaining a weekend night service as well as the frequency decrease of the N9 means that Hounslow has enough room to store their buses overnight, hence the N9 can move to Stamford Brook (V).

Post by Aubrey Morandarte

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