In 1974, I achieved a boyhood ambition and became a bus driver with London Country Bus Services Ltd, operating out of Dunton Green Garage near Sevenoaks in Kent.  Until 1970, this had been part of London Transport's Country Bus Department; in 1970 this was hived off to become one of the major constituent companies of the new National Bus Company. When I joined, the company still showed many signs of its previous incarnation; standard London bus types such as the RT and Routemaster double-deckers and the ubiquitous RF single decker were continuing to give sterling service.  Less welcome were the numbers of  AEC Merlins and Swifts which, although new, were not only far less reliable than their older counterparts but were singularly unsuited to the sorts of service that we ran.  London Country had compounded the felony by ordering some AEC Reliance coaches to replace the Routemasters on Green Line work, and were later to make a similar blunder in ordering numbers Bristol REL6H buses which were basic and unpopular with both passengers and staff.  Therefore, I joined to find the company in a very bad way in the vehicle department.  Every day, journeys were cancelled, not through lack of staff, but through lack of buses - NBA or "no bus available".  For a bus enthusiast like myself, this cloud had a silver lining; every available vehicle was pressed into service, and little regard was paid to putting the correct type on the correct route.

In 1973, the first four examples of the bus that was to prove the salvation of London Country arrived at Dunton Green.  This was the Leyland National, a remarkably good product considering where and when it came from.  In 1975, a slightly shorter version started entering service in considerable numbers, and, by the time I left in 1978, was the predominate vehicle.  The Leyland National was, like the RF before it, a jack-of-all-trades, equally at home working a Green Line from Tunbridge Wells to Windsor as it was working through the country to Ide Hill or Knockholt where, despite its size, it was very easy to manoeuvre into tight passing places.

The services operated out of Dunton Green during my time there were essentially as follows, although there was a sad and inexorable reduction in services.

GREEN LINE

London Country had inherited the extensive series of Green Line Coach routes linking the home counties with Central London. Our two routes were:

TOWN ROUTE

Through a quirk of circumstance, Dunton Green operated the only London Country route to lie entirely within Greater London. This service, always the biggest money-spinner, was given priority when it came to allocating resources:

COUNTRY ROUTES

The traditional base of Dunton Green's operations, these were in sharp decline. The basic routes were:

There were many variations on these routes, some with their own route number (421a, 431a, 454a) others without (the many journeys worked under the 471 number, for example).

Despite, or perhaps because of, the difficulties of keeping the service going, there was a better atmosphere between staff and management than in any other company I've worked for. We were left alone to get on with the job.  If the service ran and there were no complaints, management were happy. Thus it was that nobody bothered that I took a camera around with me and occasionally stopped my bus to take a photo of it (or somebody elses). On occasion, it wasn't unknown for a particular vehicle to be allocated to a particular duty at my (or some other driver's) request.  These pages are the result.  I hope you enjoy them.

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