< View previous picture - View next picture > Photographer / Copyright Peter Osborn Images should not be reused without permission. View vehicle details 1037J JXC183 1311CD MXX382 Location Link/s Wood Green Garage Date added to site 05/03/2017 Printer-friendly version of this page

Details: A rare find at Wood Green Garage sometime in the late 1960s was this pair of buses, both of which had been renumbered into the service vehicle series. To the fore is Guy Vixen 1311CD, converted from bus GS82 in 1964. Its official description was a 'Mobile Gas Unit', which puzzled me for a long time. Thanks to the Kim Rennie and Bill Aldridge history of LT SVs published in 2003, I now know that these vehicles were used to demonstrate decontamination and protection procedures in the event of an enemy gas or nuclear attack. The CD in the fleetnumber stood for Civil Defence and 1311CD replaced former bus Q75 which was allocated number 1035CD but actually carried Q1035! 1311CD was withdrawn in 1968 following the disbanding of the Civil Defence Corps, and in 1970 was sold to Tillingbourne who re-converted it to a bus. Behind 1311CD is 1037J, a mobile engineering instruction unit with a complicated history. Taken into service vehicle stock in 1956, it had the chassis from bus RT1420 with the body from service vehicle 1019J, the previous instruction unit. 1019J had had the chassis of bus SRT45 (originally STL2551) while the body had come from RT19 but was originally fitted to pioneer RT1! 1037J was kept in stock until 1978 then sold for restoration as RT1. Another livery puzzle is that SUP15 listed 1019J as being red but 1037J as being green then red. As the bus still had adverts it seemed unlikely to have been repainted. Can anyone confirm that 1037J was never green?

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Ray	If ambushed by the Foreman, the exit into River Park Road was a handy escape.	Mon 06/03/2017, 13:50