Help the Aston Manor Road Transport Museum!

The Aston Manor Road Transport Museum is a great place which i have visitedquite a lot over the years. It is under serious threat of closure though! Have a look at their website where they explain the situation and show we can help. Lets hope they can survive because their collection is terrific!

Birmingham Airport's old Maglev carriage sold on eBay

From the BBC

"A carriage from a magnetic shuttle used to transport airport passengers to a nearby railway station has been auctioned off for charity.

Birmingham Airport used Maglev carriages between 1984 and 1995. They were then replaced by cable cars."
 

Bus Museum Collectors Fair

The Aston Manor Transport Museum had another event yesterday, mostly it was a collectors fair for enthusiasts but also there was some bus running. I didn't have time to take a ride unfortunately, just missing the Bristol VR and my wife wasn't keen in standing in the cold for half an hour just to wait for a bus for some reason. I bought a book on the trams of Birmingham incidentally. They used to run past on the road i now live on. I remember when they dug up the High St in Erdington one could see the tram lines which had been tarmacked over back in the early 1950s. It is funny how now cities are bringing the trams back.

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.