Thank you KeMac for those dates. The Manchester operation did come along a few years after the rest; it was the only one to convert from One-elevens, whereas the others had been Trident operations previously, although just before their Shuttle started Belfast had a couple of Lockheed Tristar rotations per day, so it would have seemed a backward step to all-Trident.
In the beginning, for Glasgow only, the operation was all Trident 1, both main aircraft and backups. As the operation extended the Trident 3 became the principal main aircraft, with One-elevens as backups, and later again the 757. Edinburgh had been the last route to convert from Vanguards; in the early 1970s it was consistently argued that jets could not use the "old" runway, 13/31, and construction of the new runway and terminal were finally agreed after much angst. As soon as this was done Tridents were put on the Edinburgh run, and as described here the Shuttle started on the old runway (and to the old terminal) a good 12 months before the new ones were completed.
There was also a little-known 727 Shuttle operation during one of the seemingly regular Trident shortages; this was chartered from American Trans Air, but gained BA titles, and used on the Glasgow run for a few months, principally as a backup aircraft as it had been chartered at a hefty rate per hour !
Photos: Boeing 727-22 Aircraft Pictures | Airliners.net
One of the guys from our Glasgow office travelled on that first Super Shuttle day in 1983 and actually got on Concorde, this being one of the "publicity" times it was used; he gained huge street cred in the company for this for some months afterwards !
The last Trident Shuttle flight (and last BA Trident overall) was AWZU on the last day of 1985. This aircraft was then sent to Stansted where it was used for tractor pushback training, where I saw it until well into the 2000s, sometimes just sat at a spare gate in basic BA colours and looking definitely like a blast from the past. The first 757 had come in 1983 so the transition from Tridents on the Shuttle was very rapid.
My guess, from being a regular user at the time, is that the Shuttle backup operation wound up in about 1991, but I can remember being surprised to find that it had gone. After the changeover, for a while, tickets were still treated as readily transferable to earlier/later flights if possible, and the timetable seemed to be the same, it was just that the guaranteed backup had gone; then the ticketing changes were slowly clamped down on as well.
Around 1980 we did have completely "open" blank tickets for it which were kept in the petty cash tin in our office, pre-stamped for our account, which you filled in yourself and which were then invoiced by BA later, this is when pay-on-board was in operation and at a time when credit cards were still not universal.