THERE are quizzes on the internet which claim to reveal if you are a true Glaswegian.

But if you want to test if anyone over the age of 50 really does come from Glasgow, ask them if they recognise the name ERL Fitzpayne. It's not a name they will have seen written on paper, but painted in neat black lettering on an orange background.

Remember him? ERL - I never did learn his Christian names - was the general manager of the Glasgow Corporation buses in the fifties and sixties, and with the confidence that he was going to be in charge for time immemorial, his name was painted on the side of every bus so that as a passenger you could ponder the possiblities of his name as you waited to board. That's when corpy buses were a bold green and orange with a cream border. Makes today's buses a little dull.

So I was thinking of ERL at the weekend when the Glasgow Vintage Vehicle Trust opened Bridgeton Bus Garage to the public as part of Doors Open Day. You go out London Road towards Celtic Park, past Bridgeton Cross, and in an area full of anonymous warehouses there is a long brick-built building with small windows, unremarkable in many ways. But what a sight when they open the doors.

This is a vast hangar which could easily fit in a football pitch or two. Neatly lined up are more than 100 buses, ranging from a tramcar through to coaches only a decade or so old. There are buses with the old open platform at the back from where you could jump on and off at traffic lights or even when it was moving if you had missed your stop. Looking at it now you wonder why more people were not injured as we leapt towards the pavement defying the vehicle's speed. The trick was to swing round and jump off in the direction the bus was going and start running to avoid a sudden collapse on to the road.

There was also the entertainment of some poor soul running to catch up with the bus as it sped off, a hand desperately clawing for the shiny pole. Health and safety then merely consisted of a few words painted inside. "Passengers entering or leaving a vehicle whilst in motion do so at their own risk." Not telling you not to do it, merely saying it's up to you if you want to risk your cranium stoating off the tarmacadam.

Leyland Titans, Atlanteans and Olympians. No namby-pamby names for buses in those days. And you had to be a bit of an Olympian to drive them. No power steering so you had to haul that wheel round to navigate a tight corner. Driving shifts could be more than 12 hours to fit in with timetables.

Looking up the rows of buses at Bridgeton, you could name the bus companies by their colours alone. There was the red and cream of Central SMT which, for a young lad, held out the possibility of exotic destinations far into Lanarkshire and Dunbartonshire. What could Bonkle possibly be like? Sadly I went there when I was older. Not as exotic as it might sound.

Then the blue and cream of Midland Scottish taking you to villages so far away from Glasgow you thought you would have to be going on holiday to venture that far. Then the green and red of Macbraynes which really did take you on holiday, to places such as Oban. There is even a cream and green bus from Sydney in Australia - now that would really be some journey from Glasgow. But this Sydney bus was shipped there after being built at the Albion works in Scotstoun, and brought back to its home after being restored, with its vast black radiator at the front and its Albion Adventurer badge, giving it a real air of road superiority. If I wasn't a cynical old journalist I would have been wiping a tear from my eye in Bridgeton.

What is even more surprising is that this is not a bus collection owned by the nation but buses owned by individuals or small groups. I bump into academic Douglas Forbes who bought his own bus then spent 18 years restoring it. Eighteen years - that's the longest wait for a bus I've ever encountered.

So what's the attraction, I ask Douglas. "You fall in love with the things you grow up with, and for males there is the added interest of things mechanical." Douglas drove buses as a student, and you can tell it was a carefree time of excitement, hard work, and possibly power as up to 70 strangers put their lives in your hands.

So Douglas bought a bus, and like the other members of the Vehicle Trust, brought it to Bridgeton where he rents a space, and spent his spare weekends and evenings working on it. You have to be a mechanic, a painter, a sheet metal worker, an electrician, really a jack-of-all-trades, to take essentially what is a pile of scrap and turn it into a working, shiny bus.

Many members are like Douglas, the middle classes with a bit of cash to spend on buying an old bus and discovering skills they did not realise they had to make it work. It's a hobby like joining a golf club only the work is done inside and you get your hands a lot dirtier.

There are also bus mechanics, yes hard to imagine it, but men who work with buses all week then come to the bus depot in their spare time to do the same again. But they are mainly men. Women somehow don't have the same affinity for buses.

Yes the Glasgow Corpy buses are represented, including an open-topped one which was only converted to that use after a clash with a low bridge. And there written on their sides is ERL Fitzpayne. They might just be humble buses, but how many other Glaswegians have their names living on for ever?