ondon Transport erves you right . . .
Page 17
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
DNDON Transport chairman r Peter Masefield quips that e organisation's next ivertising slogan will be _ondon Transport serves you ght." Our news editor is clined to agree. As he returned home to Sutton from Morden Underground station the other night, his number 93 bus came to an abrupt halt in the depths of darkened suburbia, starved of diesel fuel. Around came the driver to apologise, announce that this was the second night in succession that such a mishap had occurred {it was flat batteries the night before), and could he borrow 5p to use a phone box?
Oh yes, there was a two-way radio in the Routemaster, but that was connected to central control in London, and they would only need to phone Sutton garage. In any case, might not such a crazy omission as forgetting to refuel a bus look bad if word spread throughout LT?
True to their word, the garage engineers arrived with a bus. "OK then, where are the flat batteries?" they asked. Suitably corrected, they shrugged shoulders, opened the filler cap of the Routemaster, and shut it again with such a hollow echoing as to confirm for all around that there was no diesel in there. Fine, but they couldn't refuel it on the spot.
They could, and did, give our man and the one fellow passenger a lift on to Sutton along with the crew of the stricken bus, provided they didn't mind sharing the lower deck with a supermarket trolley laden with spare batteries. What might they have used to transport diesel fuel?