New Bus for London in service

On Monday 27th February the New Bus for London did enter service on route 38 on a journey which commenced just after midday from Hackney Central Station.

LT2 was delivered at the weekend and prepared for service for today. Its first journey was fully loaded and attracted many positive comments from passengers and onlookers. It operated until about 2000.

A door problem interrupted its first journey but was rectified and it completed its duty. It will remain in service all week although there are some other programmed activities as well.

The others from the prototype batch will arrive over the next few weeks and follow LT2 into service. A project of this complexity will always have issues to resolve and the point of the prototype running is to expose those issues and get them fixed. Whilst a separate vehicle has undergone thousands of miles of test track testing, it is only the operation in real London service which will show us how the bus performs.

This is a fitting place to thank everyone who worked so hard to bring the project to this point. The team in TfL and everyone at Wrights to built and delivered the vehicles. It has come a long way since the project was launched in July 2008. In December 2009 Wrights were awarded the contract and only two years later delivered a working prototype.

Thanks to Graham Smith for today's photo of LT2 in service.



Yesterday's blog about the return of Steam on the Underground produced an astonishing 7500 hits. By far and away the highest ever. Thanks and welcome to all my readers!

....