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After 33 years Atlantean NDR 509J returns to the roads of Plymouth; (see the article here).

The plea for information (Feb 2018): Has been answered. Please see the Birmingham City Transport page.

A plea for information: I have had an enquiry, via another reader, from a chap who is not on the Internet but who is keen to find information on the RT type Park Royals delivered to Birmingham. Does anyone have any details of these? If so, please contact me (preferably via email). Any information you have (text/images) might, with your permission, become a part of this site; acknowledged of course. Ed.

Peter Chenery has recently (September 2016) obtained a 1974 Daimler Fleetline DMS 860 and is embarking on its restoration. He'd appreciate any information that could assist. Please see here for more information.

Here is the start of a new on-going feature called "Routes & Routemasters" has begun. This is something that will take a while to complete so please keep stopping by from time to time to see progress.

I am honoured to have the opportunity of hosting details of another Atlantean renovation project. This time it is the Leyland Atlantean NDR 509J (PRV Body No. B58169 - chassis 7100481) built during March 1971 for Plymouth Corporation. Thought to be the only surviving PRV bodied Atlantean PDR2 remaining in the in U.K., you can follow its restoration programme here.

Can you help identify the members of the London Aircraft Production Group in this image?

The very end of March saw the completion of the renovation of the PRV bodied Leyland Atlantean NRN397P (Ribble 1397). After seven long years the Ribble Vehicle Preservation Trust has achieved its goal and completed work on this vehicle originally built in April 1976 (Body No. B61756). Evidently in a shocking state in 2008, it is with congratulations to all involved in the project that I present the latest images from Jonathan Cadwallader (see Leyland Atlantean NRN397P page). All that's left to do is a road test, an MOT and a repaint to the original poppy red livery ready for the Ribble Vehicle Preservation Trust's Morecambe running day (see http://www.rvpt.co.uk/morecambe-running-day-display).

There is a new and very rare image of the Birch Taxi taken by a passenger! Please see the Birch page.

There is a new image of a Routemaster in the Works ready for delivery and some additional images of PRV built Leyland Panther's in the Sweden page.

Out of over 3000 built, 150 Green Goddess's (otherwise known as a Bedford RLHZ Self Propelled Emergency Pumps) were bodied at Park Royal. With registration Nos. PGW51 to PGW200 they were built between 1954/5 and sadly there are very few examples of these vehicles in preservation. Whilst the Green Goddess has featured on this site for some time I'm pleased to present a new article specifically on one example PGW170 that, in private ownership, has been recently housed at the Classic Air Force Museum in Newquay, Cornwall, where it will remain permanently on display. I'm keen to build separate pages for other PRV Green Goddesses and will do so as the opportunity arises.

The end of September saw the inaugural Dublin Port Rally that featured some Routemasters (see here). And it shouldn't go without mentioning that it was on Friday 24th September 1954, sixty-years-ago, when the Routemaster RM1 was unveiled to the public upon the opening of the Commercial Motor Show at Earls Court. Whilst hailed as an exciting new bus for London nobody imagined then that it would have such longevity or become such an icon.

The eagerly awaited July "60th Anniversary" of the Routemaster release (at the 1954 Commercial Motor Show) occurred over the weekend of the 12th/13th of July at Finsbury Park (see the dedicated page here). If you would like to send in your own images of the event for display on the page please do so; I will gladly attribute ownership.

The website recently clocked over 100,000 hits since the counting mechanism was introduced ten years ago. Whilst some of the "hits" will be from search engines the service does not count my hits nor those from returning visitors within a predetermined period (set to 12 hours). So it is a reasonable statistic of the site's traffic in comparison to many other such counters. (Though I could, I do not fix the counter; Ed.)

Also do you know anyone renovating a ROE vehicle. The mystery ROE panel is available to anyone who could make use of it. It has a rare an probably early printed ROE logo (see here).

And see the latest installments to the renovation of the Leyland Atlantean NRN397P by the Ribble Vehicle Preservation Trust.

And also see a rare restored, PRV built, Merryweather Fire Engine on an AEC Regent III Chassis (see here).

March 28th sees the publication by Earlswood Press of a new book by Bill Munro dedicated to a full history of the London taxi. See details as the base of the Birch Taxi page.

I'm pleased to present David Williams' article about his great uncle Reginald Carding who founded Swallow Coaches. Please see the Swallow Coaches page.

I'm pleased to add two new features:
(1) Derek Funnell has supplied a large set of documents relating to the London Transport RT - They are all downloadable from here.
(2) Derek has also provided details of RT4325.
(3) There is now a page dedicated to Swallow Coaches owned & operated by David William's great uncle Reginald Carding. There are several historic vehicles on the page and most need to be identified. Can you help?

Happy New Year to one and all! And this year the PRV site is celebrating twenty years of being on-line. But at the beginning of 1994 the "Internet" was less than five years old so no one would have seen much of the PRV website then. Most especially as it was just a set of bulletin pages on a Linux server. Fortunately, working in I.T. at the forefront of technology, meant that I knew what I wanted to create, but most proper webspace hosting services were beyond my financial reach. It wasn't until Freeserve became available, that offered 15 megabytes of free webspace, that I was able to take advantage of this and create the hypertext pages that became the start of the true PRV website. Fifteen megabytes soon became too restrictive but this was overcome by signing up an additional user account (well, it was free) and linking between the separate sub-domain pages. Today, the site has grown to near 800 megabytes and runs on a shared Linux server at Fasthosts based in Gloucester. And, as webspace is virtually unrestricted, I'll take this opportunity of inviting my visitors to send in more material for the site.

Ian McLellan-Smith (ex. PRV D.O.) has recently contacted me and is gradually supplying many more interesting images as time permits. Please keep returning to see what else Ian has been able to find in his collection.

Merry Christmas to one and all! On the introduction page you will see a Routemaster decorated for Christmas in Düsseldorf some years ago. Kindly sent in by Hermann Herfurtner you can see more of this decorated vehicle on the 'Routemaster Around the World' page.

A separate section for LT's Aldenham Works has been created with an enhanced description of the bus overhaul procedures (I am grateful to Brian Watkinson for this).

On the PRVdesign Group page I'm pleased to present a wonderful YouTube video (originally filmed by a member of the Group) with very rare footage of the Park Royal works in the sixties, along with buses & trams etc.. Be sure to take a look at this great piece of social history.

UMP227 renovation is complete and the vehicle was officially "launched" at the London Bus Museum "Transportfest 2013" event on 20th October at the Brooklands museum site. - see the AEC Regal page.

Another picture of a Halifax bomber is available on the Aircraft Factory page - but this one is signed by the factory senior personnel.

The section on the Green Goddesses has been considerably updated and now contains some links to YouTube videos that may be of interest. The Employees Page has also been updated considerably during these last few months.

The release of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 10 has brought with it the usual bunch of incompatibility issues; and this website suffers from occasional slightly misaligned images (from where I expect them to be placed) and the disappearance of the normally coloured scroll bars that appear grey and sometimes almost invisible.

Whilst I am trying to find a fix for these issues (there are perhaps several possible options), I would recommend site visitors using IE10, click the "Compatibility View" button next to the "Refresh" button to the right end of the Address Bar. This appears to correct some of the rendering issues and has a half-hearted attempt at correcting the scroll bars. (Site visitors using other browsers already endure the lack of colored scroll bars as these were, up to now, only rendered by the IE engine.)

The only alternative is to use the MAXTHON 2 browser that uses the IE8 engine and renders the website as expected. (Note: I do mean MAXTHON 2 and not version 3 that renders the site very poorly). However please also be aware that MAXTHON 2 is considered obsolete [deprecated] by some services (e.g. Youtube).

Update: I have made changes that appear to force "Compatibility View" for all pages of the website. IE10 however does not support fully the coloured scroll bars. If a visitor finds any significant issue with this website using IE10 I shall be pleased to be made aware of it.

A new feature of this site is the organisation of vehicles by initial Operator. See the Operator links ( ONLY on the PRV Index) to the left.

This is my first attempt at doing this and the list is not exhaustive; more to follow. I trust my visitors will find this a useful addition to the site.

John Foster has recently supplied me with hundreds of photographs of PRV & other coachbuilders' buses plus other items of interest.

I am beginning now to scan the images and place them on the site. It will take me quite a while so please keep coming back; better still why don't you sign up to my mailing list!

It would clearly be overly repetitive to attribute the each & every image supplied by John, especially as they will enhance almost every page of the PRV section - and more, so I would just mention here that I am very grateful to him for the donation.

I shall place here links to the new pages and those that have been updated with his images:

AEC Bridgemaster	Updated	Leyland Atlantean	New	London Transport RT	Updated	Bristol RE	New
AEC Mercury	New	Leyland Ergomatic	New	PRV Royalist	Updated	Daimler Fleetline	New
AEC Regent	Updated	Leyland Leopard	New	Routemaster RM1	New	Guy Arab	Updated
AEC Regent V	Updated	Leyland Panther	New	Routemaster RM3	New	Odds & Ends	Updated
AEC Regent V Build	New	Leyland Tiger Cub	New	Routemaster Jigs	New	Mystery Tour	Updated
AEC Reliance	Updated	Leyland Titan	Updated			Vehicle Interiors	Updated
AEC Renown	New	(B15-4) Prototype	New
AEC Swift	New	Leyland Titan PD2?	New