Sick of London? Well maybe without the Routemaster

The eminent thinker Doctor Johnson famously said "A man who is sick of London is sick of life". Of course he was talking about the Georgian period and it's many pleasures for the wealthy Gentlemen but even in the Nineties there was plenty for the bus enthusiast as miraculously Routemasters soldiered on amidst the less popular new types like the Metrobus replacement, the Spectra from MCW. The Metrobus like the later Atlantean AN68 was a great success as it gave operators something like what they wanted and even though Leyland's Olympian wasn't hugely popular London's small batch of Spectras remained it's largest order. I think it went out of production with Optare who bought out MCW's bus interests promising to do some more development work but in the meantime they became more involved with the singledecker and the even smaller midi-bus market. Despite this without a suitable replacement it has remained available as  few more have been built more recently as I can cite a batch of Y-Reg buses from about 2001 that work from the former West Riding base at Wakefield for the giant Arriva.