Yes a Honda Tonka van almost totally spoilt my lovely shot but I didn't want this old Globus Gateway bus to get away as it started life as a rather glamorous MCW Demonstrator. The Metropolitan has largely been forgotten but it was the first decent attempt to market something better than the Leyland Monopoly wanted to offer at that time in the early Seventies. The Birmingham built Swedish bus certainly wooed the major operators as London and nearly all the PTE's took some, and not forgetting those forward looking Municipals like Reading, Newport and Leicester. And why not for these Anglo-Swedish buses had bags of power and floated on air, but sadly enviable sophistication was not enough and as they quickly aged they became troublesome and even more costly to run. Consequently the industry in it's quest to break away from the Government controlled Leyland then sought something rather more down to earth and old-fashioned enough to be Gardner Powered. So MCW gave them the Metrobus which might have resembled the Metropolitan but now fitted the bill. However the Metropolitan was ahead of it's time and the big low-floor double-deckers of today from Dennis and Volvo seem to just plod along like gutless dinosaurs when compared to the 1974 MCW/Scania battle-bus from Washwood Heath.
Hi Christopher,
ReplyDeleteReading seemed to have no problem keeping it Metropolitans running and even topped up its fleet with second hand ones from London and later also from Tyne and Wear. I don't think they would have done that if the bus didn't have its merits. Maybe the operators that didn't like them just didn't have the right approach. Just a thought?
Andrew
I know they had cost problems with the Metro-Scania single-deckers at Leicester and wasn't there corrosion issues too. No doubt when an operator likes a bus they go out of their way to get the best from them.
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