I have been connected in one way or another for most of my life with buses. My father became a bus driver in 1949 when we moved to Cardiff. I was just a baby at the time of course but as I grew up along with my brothers we came to accept as normal the strange hours and coming and goings that made up a bus drivers life at the time.
Dad had to work long hours just to make a living back then and to be honest that is still much the same all these years later. The wages are far better but the cost of living is much higher and many drivers still work extra shifts and overtime to make a good wage.
When I was 21 years old, I had lost a job and decided that perhaps bus life was for me. It was easy enough to get on at that time. Dad was still on there of course and had progressed to the inspectorships. He was a depot inspector at that time, something that I would do many years later.
But that was much later. Bus life and the shifts that are worked are not easy at all and for a young man who was just married getting up at stupid hours of the morning and starting at around 4.00am was not as easy as I had thought.
But I started as a bus conductor and after about six months learned to drive a bus. I enjoyed that part of it and still enjoy driving buses over 40 years later. Of course back then there was no ‘one-man’ buses and we teamed up with a conductor. Good friends were made back then and many driver/conductor teams are still close friends today.
But like it or not the future was coming and many did not like it. One Man buses were the future and on the way in. Of course young men like myself could see this and there was a good pay rise as well for driving these new vehicles. But of course there were many that hated the idea. The old conductors that had been with their ‘mates’ for many years fought hard against the change.
Although I took to it straight away and was in fact on the second batch of drivers ever to drive a one man bus in Cardiff, there were only a few routes and no-one seriously thought that every route would go to one-man operation. There would always be a place for the conductor as Cardiff
had many routes that were far to busy to go to on-man operation.
And of course for a while that was the case. The one-man drivers had all the easy quiet routes and the two man teams had the busy ones. But little by little that stopped. Gradually as the older men retired other routes were brought in to operation and slowly the easy routes took on harder and busier routes.
But that was for time to come. For me as I have said earlier getting up was a problem. I was late a lot and one time even my father sent me home as he had no work. With a young child and working many hours it was getting to much and I decided to leave and find another job with less hours. That was in 1973 and of course I never thought that I would come back.. But in 1977 I did come back. Click on the next page for that.
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