Did you ever wonder how and why some of London's buses are numbered with letters? On the day that the S2 disappears, here's an answer. Three months ago David Brake forwarded me an email from Peter Osborn, who runs Red-RF.com, giving detailed information about the genesis of lettered bus routes. I reproduce this below, with thanks (and it now appears on Red-RF.com in the London Transport route numbering section).
The infamous Bus Reshaping Plan of 1968 made major upheavals to long-standing patterns of service and introduced areas of 'flat-fare' operation (now that all London bus journeys cost the same, it is easy to forget that crews used to have to cope with complex fare charts for each route). These were numbered with a letter prefix based on the area, thus starting with the W series and moving on to include Peckham, Ealing and so on.
The idea behind Reshaping was to replace parts of the bus network with a 'hub & spoke' arrangement, shortening trunk routes and providing high-capacity local links. At the same time, many suburban routes were converted to one-man operated buses. The high-capacity routes were 'flat-fare' - i.e. the same price for any distance, and used automatic fare machines on buses designed to carry large numbers of standing passengers. The Plan was a response to increasing staff problems and financial constraints at London Transport.
Implementation started in September 1968 in the Wood Green area (W routes W1 to W6 initially) and at Walthamstow (linked with the opening of the Victoria Line), where only one new service was flat-fare, the W21. The Wood Green area stretched from Crouch End to Edmonton, and encompasses today's routes W1 to W10. The Walthamstow area covers today's W11 to W19.
Reshaping, as first tried, was a disaster. Too much changed too quickly, the buses were too long for some of the roads and were unreliable, as was the fare equipment. And passengers didn't like standing. But the staffing and cost reasons behind all this were irrefutable, and then Ken Livingstone came along with Fare's Fair, so over time the old variable fares died out, first by fixed-fare zones then London-wide. One-man (later one-person) operation became inevitable, although some would argue the jury is still out on the efficiency of OPO on high-frequency trunk routes.
So the area schemes continued to be rolled out. Ealing (E routes), Peckham (P routes, even though P1, P2 and later P4 didn't go to Peckham), Morden (M routes) and Harrow (H routes) appeared by 1969. But the rot had set in - the Harrow scheme was a shadow of the original proposal and Woolwich and Romford schemes never got off the ground. A limited Croydon scheme (C routes, later abandoned) went ahead in 1970 and some Stratford (S) routes in 1971. Later schemes were the Bexley area (B routes), Docklands (D routes), Hounslow (H20 upwards), Kingston (K routes) Orpington (R routes for 'Roundabout', the group name) and Uxbridge (U routes).
Later examples of prefix route numbers tended to be local, rather tortuous routes, introduced to get buses into streets not previously served. This trend started with the minibus services in 1973 - see this link for more detail (it explains the C11) - and continued with the likes of Sutton services (S routes, including S3 which was previous used at Stratford) and Richmond routes (R68 etc). There are still oddities, like G1, presumably named after St Georges Hospital for which it's a local service, and the PR and RV routes which I mention at the end of the article on my site.
Thanks Peter. He recommends LOTS as the source of real information on the subject. I've now had a go at summarising London's current lettered buses in the table below.
The infamous Bus Reshaping Plan of 1968 made major upheavals to long-standing patterns of service and introduced areas of 'flat-fare' operation (now that all London bus journeys cost the same, it is easy to forget that crews used to have to cope with complex fare charts for each route). These were numbered with a letter prefix based on the area, thus starting with the W series and moving on to include Peckham, Ealing and so on.
