A Bus Thread!
 

This is what I love about PPRuNe - you never know where the thread is going to go.

How long before the flight time, did the bus depart and what happened when the bus arrived at Heathrow? Did it drive straight to the aircraft?

I was having trouble visualising the current airport layout on The SSK's map, so I made an approximate overlay, from a modern map.

It is hard to believe there was a complete grass aerodrome between the central area and T4:

http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c3...eathrowMap.jpg

map age?
 

The SSK
Are you sure the map is immediately prewar? It shows the Colnbrook bypass and I thought that wasn't built until much later:confused:
The bypass was 3 lanes, one each way and a take your chance suicide lane in the centre:eek:
It shows the 'Punchbowl' pub, but not possibly the most famous of them all the 'Ostrich' located in Colnbrook high street.

Found my answer in a previous thread.

Seems this is a 1940 revision of a prewar map, the roads lined in red, like the Colnbrook bypass and the GWR Extension, were additions since the earlier version.

You wait - before long it will be "Tugs that used to push me back ....." :)

Quite right too. it is all avation nostalgia and history.

A few pics at LHR taken by me in 1958. Taken with a Brownie 127 so quality not the best!

http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/g...e/scan0007.jpg

http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/g...e/scan0006.jpg

http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/g...e/scan0004.jpg

http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/g...e/scan0003.jpg

Old OS Maps
 

for anyone who wants to see old maps, I have found an interesting site at :

www.ponies.me.uk

This is a very clever site where someone has scanned in OS maps from the 1920/30/40s and correctly positioned them. You can zoom in to nearly anywhere in the country.

The clever bit is the "Transparency Slider" at the bottom via which you can overlay the current road layout.

The Heathrow area does show "Heathrow Aerodrome", but not much else !!

Try it.

A film showing the early days of Heathrow can be found here or here.

A little more as a policeman in 1970 for the BAAC the tower at Northside was used by the Police vehicle removal unit but was bulldozed that year I am sure. I never had the pleasure of going into it. Forward to the LHR - JFK first Concorde flight you could actually drive unchecked from the southside peri road past the Air India Hangar and park up alongside the runway and watch the aircraft as 100's did on that day, which was please? Off the Northern Oeri were a couple of Brittania size hangars and I recall 2 parked up Brits? in Northeast livery in 1970 and a cargo company Saggitair always coming in on full emergencys? Many hights were foggy and the the T5 sewage farm was all open to the public, it was often a very spookey place LHR, illegals living under T2 with cooking areas and beds and a civil defence room under the entry roadway.

Hanger - A listed structure
 

One of these hanger arches ( nearest to Hatton Cross tube station) is still visible. The others have a modern extention in front of them.
I understand that they are the largest unsupported arches of their era.



http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/g...e/scan0003.jpg

[pedant] They are not actually arches but beams cantilevered out from vertical supports either side of the opening. [/pedant]

That Britannia, G-AOVG was the plane me and my wife flew on from Luton to Basle on our honeymoon in 1972. It was with Monarch then.

Sorry about the thread drift, carry on!

A4 Colnbrook bypass opened 1929. 3 lanes, 36 foot wide road was common rural main road specification from the late 1920s until 1950s. Yes, it was rural then.

Great West Road, alias the Hounslow bypass, was a little later, and dual carriageway as to urban spec.

What a great You Tube clip on LHR construction, gee you wonder how it ever got built without the lads wearing fluoro shirts and ear muffs! ;)

Duckbutt

Thanks for your expert description. Your [pedant] was well justified.
I knew they were something special hence they are protected but I had no idea of the technical name.

( About ten years ago BA had to get English Heritage clearance before A/C could be installed A/C = Air Conditioning in the offices)
This presented big problems because the detailed building plans had been lost.

Looking again at the photo.
Behind the A/C tail appears to be TBC ( Technical Block C) under construction but still there with Speedbird House on the left.

So this view of the hanger still exists today but with the new road from Hatton Cross to North side passing in front of it.

I recommend a book entitled Heathrow 2000 Years of History, by Philip Sherwood. First published in 1999 my copy is from the 2001 reprint. It is on Sutton Publishing and the ISBN is 0-7509-2132-3. The book contains many interesting photographs and maps, especially those in chapter eight. It is also vey thought provoking as to how the place has changed even since this book was published.

re the previous posts in this thread, thanks for the excellent pictures. I have only been at Heathrow since 1979 so am still really a newbie.

Haethrow building site
 

I first saw LHR in March 1963... a building site, a mess.
I worked there for 8 years until 1971
It is still a building site, a bigger mess, a place best avoided.
Great pictures!

Returning to buses; anyone remember the film 'The Runaway Bus' with Frankie Howerd and Margaret Rutherford? Frankie was an airport bus driver employed by either BEA or BOAC; at a fogbound London Airport in about '53 (so you didn't see a lot of the airport) he has to transfer some passengers to Blackbushe - and gets lost in the fog in the army ranges near Bagshot!!

Good grief! I have not thought about "the Runaway Bus" in years. It was Frankie Howard's first film if I remember right. He was the driver of a BOAC bus. There had been a bullion robbery at Heathrow and the the thieves had stored the bullion on the bus. The crooked mastermind was also on the bus, but I cannot remember who it was.

May be wrong - it's years since I last saw it but it has been shown on TV - it turned out to be Margaret Rutherford (thread creep - the 'original' Miss Marple)

Margaret Rutherford as the villain sounds right. A wonderful actress.

I am building a scale model of Heathrow in 1/400th scale as it looked in the '60s. Here is one of the photos of my model to bring back memories.

http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n...o/LAP62big.jpg

AMos Keeto, wow that looks good.

I bet that was alot of work to do. Must have taken a while to build.

would you be able to post another pic of your model (like a general overview of your model airfield) ?

RD

Amos Keeto : Looks like a great model.

Would an Air France Connie and the 727 in the background have been there at the same time ?

Does it matter.

Don't forget the oil-stains under the piston a/c :}

Yes, 1964 or 1965 IIRC. After that the Connies only put in rare "extra" appearances and all were retired by 1967.

Amazing, more pics please! Are those the Corgi models?

Not to nitpick (after all, you're free to have deliberate anachronisms if you want), but I seriously doubt Air France 727s visited Heathrow in 1964 or 1965. There were -200 Advanced versions, which would put them at 1969 or so at the earliest, I think.

Amos Keeto, Supurb model ! Wow wish I had that amount of skill and patience ! Below is the bottom right hand corner of your photo ?

http://i261.photobucket.com/albums/i...me/lap60s1.jpg

Look at the wide open spaces on this one ? and the BOAC ad on the fire station.

http://i261.photobucket.com/albums/i...me/lap60s3.jpg

BOAC maintenance area again, looking busy ?

http://i261.photobucket.com/albums/i...me/lap60s2.jpg

All photos courtesy of Colin Laurie, with permission. Keith.

We're talking about LH 727s (see picture).

I remember that when the Piccadilly Line terminated at Hounslow West one had to catch a London Transport single decker (A1?) which, I think, ran nonstop to the central area and was, when I used it, frequently packed. This would have been the early '70s.
P.S. I, too, recall cycling into the central area.

I thought the bus from Hounslow West to central was 91B, may be wrong, we are talking almost 50 years ago ! spotting at London Airport !
Glory Daze. Keith.

The A1 nonstop bus from Hounslow West station to the Central Area started in about 1969, and ran until the Underground was extended about 10 years later. They used old London single-deck buses from the early 1950s (AEC RF type for the technically minded) with their whining transmissions and thundering engines, and some seats taken out for luggage racks and more standing room. Eventually it was found the Underground was not as universally convenient as hoped and a new express A1 bus was started, this time from Heathrow to Central London. This lasted until the Heathrow Express came along.

Every week in 'Skyport' there is a brief article about some kind of historical aspect of flying at Heathrow and/or Gatwick. This weeks issue covers the creation of the twin-bore tunnel from the A4 Bath road into the Central Area, and has a photo showing the work in progress.

Some great memories here....

As someone who grew up in Hounslow (underneath 28R) and later lived in Harlington and Sipson I also have lots of memeories... here are a few (which seem difficult to believe in today's security driven world)

I remember the first BOAC 747 at LHR (G-AWNA??) .... it and a couple of others were parked on the North side but could be easily accessed from a service road off of the Bath Road. I went there one evening with my dad (1969?) and we just parked up and calmly walked around the "sound baffle wall" and explored the undercarriage of this unbelievable aircraft. No one seemed in the slightest bothered by us being there!

In the early 70s I would get the 82 bus from Hounslow garage to LHR, and with other urchins would go around the terminals collecting anything that was free.... timetables luggage labels etc (in fact I have just bought the 1970 ESSO guide to London Airport from Ebay... I used to get one a week in those days!).... but most of all sugar cubes from the cafés, we would then go to the edge of the balcony in T1 and drop them onto the heads of the poor sods siting in the public phone areas on the lower floor (sorry if I ever got you)

In the mid 70s everyone my age had a sports moped (FS1Es, AP50s etc). The airport tunnel (the smaller bike/pedestrian one) was the favored place for seeing how fast your bike could go... the gentle slope down and no wind allowed us Fizzie boys to see 50mph on the clock. Most evenings you could see boy racers whizzing through, chin on the tank!

I particularly remember one evening in the early 80s in the White Hart (Harlington). A girl I was with knew I was interested in aircraft and asked if i would like to sit in the cockpit of Concorde. A call was duly made and after the pubs shut we headed off for TB J (i think). It turned out her mate's husband was the foreman electrician on the night shift , and for small donation to their tea swindle you could get a guided tour of anything in the hanger that night (and for me that was 747s and Concorde). The ground systems were all powered up and I had great fun whizzing back and forth in the the electrically powered captain's seat. There were several other parties also going around... they had quit a little thing going!!

Other memories include seeing the plume of smoke from our back garden when the BOAC 707 lost an engine and caught fire ('67?).... and returning from Pirbright range as an ATC cadet and being caught in the Sunday afternoon traffic at the Crooked Billett on the A30 when Papa India crashed.

In later years, racing a guy in an MGB off the lights at Hatton Cross and in th ensuing burn up around the perimeter road the MGB spun and rolled on the very sharp bend on the Northern Perimeter road and he had to be rescued by a transit full of BA workers who lifted the car up for him to crawl out, and the Pan Am maintenance base on the south side that always had a 727 parked there...

Sadly it just not the same over there anymore....

agreed-so so much has changed.

i remember the 105 bus route, with those jump on, jump off routemaster buses which used to travel from shepherds bush to heathrow, & was like soo cheap to travel on them just to see heathrow. it was like 20p return with those conductors too.

oh those were the days. i remember the first time my friend took me to heathrow when the bus fare for some days went cheap, i had no idea where i was really going, & when i got into the tunnel, i started nearly crying wondering where the hell we had got to...:eek:

i remember harry heathrow-the teddy bear, those security guards in brown uniforms who used to advise us to leave, but we didn't, that trolley tunnel next to T2 where me & my mates used to race each other on them!, the queens building where so much could be seen, the busy bus stations.

a lot of the times whilst at work, i look at things around the airport & try to place myself back in those days again. very early 80's.
i know they will never return, but the feeling of being part of that is such a good feeling.

233SQN

Darn good thing ASBOs weren't around in those days - and security wasn't "paramount"!!

Amos Keeto

Great Model.

If you have a wide angle lens I would use it and stop down to get the focus sharp from foreground to background. It will look more realistic and enhance your modeling skills.

Dirtying down is another skill entirely.

I used to do all that for a living. Decades ago.

Re the A1 bus service. RF's were not used:

The A1 Airport Express was introduced in 1969, providing a direct non-stop link between Hounslow West Underground Station and Heathrow Airport Central, as a forerunner to the Piccadilly Line extension to Heathrow. The route was initially operated by MBSs and later SMSs, and was withdrawn in 1977 when the Piccadilly Line extension opened.

The number A1 was reused in 1981 for London United’s express Airbus service between Heathrow and London (Victoria Station) via Cromwell Road. It was withdrawn in 1999 when Heathrow Express trains began running to Paddington. (cf London Transport Lettered Routes A–C)