D9 50th Anniversary

History is not just walking around museums or trawling through dusty archives, history also includes the preservation of the once commonplace and mundane. Old buses are an interest of mine though mainly from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. One of my favourite places to visit in this vein is the Aston Manor Transport Museum which held an open day today to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the BMMO D9 bus.



So the theme of the day was Midland Red, personally i grew up in WMPTE territory so my Midland Red experience is not that wide, i remember taking the X99 a few times to Sutton Coldfield. That doesn't matter, it was great to see a wide selection of Midland Red and other operators' buses including at least 3 Routemasters. I travelled on one of these and later a D9 on some trips to the city centre and back. The great thing about this kind of history is that you can interact with it, relive it. You can't really do that with a Roman sword, well not legally anyway.

The full set of pictures are here. For more information about the D9 this webpage has a brief history.