ALISTAIR Ramsay fondly recalls the time he had a bus brought all the way from Malta to Glasgow. “I went out to Malta to speak at an international conference,” he says, “and, while I was there, I saw all these beautiful old buses, hundreds of them running all over the island, and I thought, wouldn’t it be great to get one of these back to Scotland?”

Then, as now, Dr Ramsay MBE was a trustee with the Glasgow Vintage Vehicle Trust. His hope was, somehow, to bring home one of these striking buses, so that the trust’s Back on the Road team, consisting of recovered drug or alcohol addicts, could get to work on it.

“Long story short,” he continues, “I went back there at the invitation of a group I knew, and they’d arranged for me to meet the Minister of Transport.

“At that time, it was forbidden to export a vehicle from the island other than as scrap metal, but the minister told me they were going to change the law.”

He then met the island’s transport managers. On the huge table in the boardroom were folders, one for every bus on the island. Right, the managers told him. Which one do you want? “Kid in a sweetshop,” he laughs.

Which is why the hundred-plus buses and other vehicles in the trust’s spacious old garage in Bridgeton’s Fordneuk Street include a Maltese service bus which, for years, took people between Sliema and Mosta. Its pristine paintwork gleams. It’s fully roadworthy and taxed, too.

“When it came here, its sides were bashed in, because of the way it had been lifted off the boat. It would never have passed an MoT, either. Our Back on the Road team of ex-addicts have done an excellent job restoring it.

“Originally, Maltese buses were colour-coded, because many people couldn’t read. This bus was light green with a dark green stripe. Later, it was green with a white top, and from 1979 they were all painted bright yellow, to reflect the sunshine. When Malta joined the EU in 2004, all the old buses had to be scrapped, because they couldn’t take wheelchairs.”

This particular bus chassis dates from 1932, its body from 20 years later. “Technically,” Dr Ramsay says, “it’s a 31-seater, but it regularly carried 70. That was how buses ran in Malta – they were packed.”

How on earth did you get 70 people into this modest-sized bus? Simple, he says: “They used to sit on top of each other.”

The garage here, as it turns out, was actually built as a bus garage. Glasgow Corporation opened it in 1965 but it was shut nine years later by Greater Glasgow Passenger Transport Executive and was later used as an internal transport depot. The trust has leased it since 2003, and its functionality suits its new purpose very well. In one of the upstairs rooms is a archive of 150,000 photographs, plus memorabilia.

And each bus here has a history. Parked next to the Malta bus are a couple of MacBraynes buses, which used to run up and down the Scottish west coast. One has the registration plate, GUS 926, dates from 1949, has a Maudslay Marathon III chassis, and was based at the Ardrishaig Depot, Argyll. The other, HGG 359, was based at a MacBrayne garage on Mull and was later owned by a small-coach operator in Argyll before passing into private hands.

“MacBrayne’s actually bought buses that were built on lorry chassis,” Dr Ramsay explains. “Lorry chassis were higher up and, with all these ups and downs and twisty bends that are a feature on the west coast, they were ideal.

“The Thornycroft Nippy chassis on HGG 359 is a perfect example of that.”

Like the Maltese bus, the two MacBraynes have nice lines, are easy on the eye. We clamber inside HGG and look at the driver’s seat. It’s basic: “murder to drive, no power steering”, Dr Ramsay says.

In fact, this particular bus featured in a BBC TV remake of Agatha Christie’s 1950’s-set Murder by Innocence when scenes were shot in Coulport last summer.

Dr Ramsay turned 70 last December. Buses have fascinated him since he was 10 years old. “It all began on Arran. I used to go there with the family on holidays, from when I was six months old until I was about 17. In the days before we had a car, we’d get off the boat at Brodick and the buses would all be lined up, waiting to take you to wherever you were going. I just fell in love with these wee, short single-deckers. Some of them had come through the war, some had been war-surplus. There were fascinating makes, too: Bedfords and Commers, Albion and so on.

“I always used to feel my holiday started when you got on the bus and the bus would go up the hill and came down into Lamlash, where we always stayed. There was a kind of competition between my brother and I, to see who could spot Holy Isle first as the bus came over the hill.”

He also had an uncle Robert who drove a Corpy bus out of Larkfield garage. In the summer he’d leave his Mount Florida home in the hopes of getting a return lift to Castlemilk with him.

The buses on show at the Bridgeton garage have household names on their sides, strangely comforting to people of a certain age: Central SMT, Midland Bluebird, Western SMT, Greater Glasgow PTE, Highland Omnibuses, Alexander (Fife), Eastern Scottish. There are even a couple of old London Routemasters. “Our rule here,” says Dr Ramsay, “is that any bus that was built in Scotland, or ran in Scotland, or was of a type that ran in Scotland and we can’t get any more” is what the trust is interested in.

We pass a 1958 fire engine that saw service in Greenock. “Petrol-driven, Dennis F8 chassis, Rolls-Royce engine,” says Dr Ramsay. “Immaculate, absolutely immaculate.” Then we come to a halt in front of a 1959 open-topped bus, registration number FYS 8 (originally SGD 10), this was the old Corporation/GGPTE bus that, on May 25, 1978, took Ally Macleod and his Scotland players round Hampden in front of 22,000 banner-waving fans prior to their ill-fated trip to the World Cup in Argentina – the one, lest we forget, with Peru and Iran (though with Archie Gemmill’s goal, too.) Nearby is a former Stagecoach bus (new in 2001: Dennis Trident chassis), one of several “surplus” Stagecoach buses brought from London to provide transport during the 2014 Commonwealth Games. We get inside. “Immaculate,” Dr Ramsay says approvingly. “Power steering, too, unlike most of our other buses. You need forearms like Popeye’s to drive these …”

He talks about the success of the Back on the Road project (it works with people with addiction problems, and people who have received Community Payback Orders from the courts), about the bus tours and open days that the hard-working trust volunteers put on regularly. (The next Open Sunday is on May 6.) The trust also has an arrangement with Alzheimer’s Scotland, in which older people who have been diagnosed with the illness, visit the buses here. It doesn’t take much for the memories to come pouring forth.

“It’s really interesting. Very often, when they come here, all of a sudden they open up to a conversation which they’d never had in the home they were living in.” He snaps his fingers. “Something has been triggered.

“They’ll see a bus and say, ‘I used to get that bus to my work’. Or, ‘I met my wife on that bus like that, or ‘I used to visit my granny in that bus’.

“There’s a whole range of memories here. Old Corpy mechanics remember working on specific buses. Some ladies say they used to work as clippies, and they’ll talk about their old ticket-issuing machines.

“We have a dummy dressed in a clippy’s outfit. They’ll see it and say, ‘I had a jacket like that’, or ‘That was what my hat was like’.

And they’ll say, ‘My [employee] number was – “, and they’ll talk about that. There are so many memories here.”

We look at other buses, each with its own interesting back-story. You can see why bus enthusiasts and casual visitors alike are drawn here in such large numbers, When we emerge outside again Dr Ramsay has one last story.

“Each of the old bus garages had a sporting theme. The theme here at Fordneuk Street was boxing.

The top floor had a proper boxing-ring and a full training area.”

He laughs. “I’d love to think that some of the disputes between inspectors and drivers were settled in the ring …”

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