Book Review: The London Merlins

Sunday 3rd August 2025

While passing through Covent Garden recently I naturally called by London Transport Museum’s slimmed down, sad-shadow-of-it’s-former-glory bookshop, but still managed to splash the cash (or more accurately, tap the card) and buy three books, each with a personal connection.

Here’s the first: it’s the sad tale of the London Merlins told by Matthew Warmby.

And if you’re thinking that’s not a book for me, far too niche, you’ll be surprised just how many times history repeats itself within the bus industry (or rail industry for that matter) with decision makers thinking they’re making the right decision, often taken well away from the ‘operational front line’, and ending up wasting a fortune on a fleet of unsuitable vehicles deploying operating practices that are a complete turn off for passengers.

That’s what happened when London Transport bought 665 AEC Swift single deck buses in the late 1960s as a way of solving two intractable and continuing problems having a devastating effect on service quality – traffic congestion impacting reliability of long trunk routes and severe shortages of drivers and conductors leading to many journey cancellations.

This was at a time before driver only double deck operation was legal, so to be fair to London Transport’s senior managers for a paragraph – they didn’t have a lot of options open to them of what to do.

The ‘Merlins’, as the vehicles were initially dubbed, would see the suburban ends of long trunk routes into central London cut back with shorter ‘satellite style’ feeder routes into ‘transport nodes’ such as Underground stations (they’d be called ‘mobility hubs’ in today’s parlance) and thus improve timekeeping and, being one-person-operated, they’d also help resolve the staff shortage.

Matthew provides a comprehensive and fascinating background explaining how the flawed decision making process lead to what became a debacle of monumental proportions. Having successfully introduced the first Red Arrow route, numbered 500, in April 1966, London Transport set about introducing many more schemes to revolutionise the Capital’s struggling bus network, beginning with the largest ever set of route changes in its history on 7th September 1968. Matthew explains how and why it all went disastrously wrong.

The changes coincided with the opening of the Victoria line (initially between Walthamstow Central and Highbury & Islington) and saw 1,100 buses – a fifth of the total bus fleet – move location and 150 new Merlins enter service overnight facilitating a substantially revised bus network across north London and an expanded Red Arrow network in central London.

But, literally within hours of the first ‘Merlins’ leaving their garages that first Saturday morning to run the network of new services in the Wood Green and Walthamstow areas deploying a new system of route numbers using a prefix letter – W1, W2, W3, W4, W5, W6, W21 – together with an alien system of fare collection, it became a shambolic disaster.

I lived in the area at the time – on the W4 route in Winchmore Hill – and as a keen 14 year old interested in this revolutionary development of London’s buses can still vividly recall riding up and down the fledgling route and thinking ‘this is never going to work’.

And while it’s accepted any major change leads to inevitable teething problems, which usually soon settle down, it was very clear in this case, as matters worsened day by day, that far from things improving there was going to need to be a full set of teeth extraction.

A myriad of problems were faced by both passengers and staff. For passengers the new fare collection system proved impractical. Two turnstiles greeted you on boarding each with a machine accepting pre decimalisation 3d and 6d coins for the new 6d flat fare. Children had to use the offside machine and press a button which made a sound to alert the driver they’d be paying 3d. Parents with multiple children had to pay for each one individually in turn and imagine how it was for a parent with a push chair – which had to be folded – and multiple children and shopping. Many passengers with shopping, having managed to find a free hand to insert their 6d (no change was given), would push the turnstile ahead of them with their shopping bags resulting in the shopping going through but the passenger facing the next bar of the turnstile still on the wrong side. After eventually passing through passengers arrived in a standing area with no seats between the turnstiles and the centre door, with just 25 seats in the raised rear section. The buses were soon dubbed ‘cattle trucks’ and loathed.

LT bosses had made the fatal mistake of thinking because similar vehicles introduced in 1966 on new Red Arrow route 500 between Victoria and Marble Arch had been a huge success, the same principles could be successfully applied in the suburbs on new shortened flat fare routes. They forgot that what might be acceptable travelling conditions for hardened peak hour commuters are not appropriate for suburban passengers used to having a seat and personal service from a conductor.

Drivers faced challenges getting used to the 36 foot long vehicles which weren’t ideal for many of the routes with tight corners and narrow widths to pass through while the mechanical and structural state of the vehicles themselves caused the biggest headache not helped by them being in storage for months and even years while LT managers had been trying to negotiate an agreement with the TGWU for their operation. They were alien vehicles for engineers at garages, more used to the simplicity of Routemasters, RTs and RFs.

But by September 1968 it was too late to change course in the light of that disastrous north London launch. By then the die had been cast. LT bosses had already ordered hundreds more similar buses, committing themselves to further flat fare schemes in Ealing, Surrey Docks, Hackbridge, Muswell Hill, Enfield and more.

Local media had a field day as more schemes were introduced.

Modifications were made to the buses over the ensuing months including fitting seven individual seats in the standing area and trialling a changed fare collection system with a machine on the nearside able to issue three fares and passengers able to pay the driver on the offside ‘channel’ with officials realising a flat fare system was not going to work universally across the network. In due course further buses were ordered to a shorter length and referred to as Swifts but that’s a development for a follow up book in due course.

It wasn’t all bad news. Merlins were successfully deployed on an expanded network of Red Arrow routes, albeit a network that seemed to be constantly changing, and others were operated on a pay-the-driver conventional basis on some suburban routes and had a relatively happier time. But by 1973, just five years after introduction on the Wood Green scheme, the decision was taken to withdraw much of the fleet and replace it with the shorter Swifts, new Fleetline double deck buses (which had their own troubled career with London Transport), or by the late 1970s, a smaller Red Arrow network gained Leyland Nationals.

A number of Merlins passed over to London Country on its formation in 1970 with some of these initially adopting yet another fare collection system – Autofare – which was also soon abandoned. If only Oyster, Smartcards and contactless had existed 50 years ago, some of these issues would not have arisen.

Indeed, similar issues with impractical fare collection impacted the ftr (Streetcar) roll out initiated by First Bus in 2006 when company bosses expected passengers to board and start faffing around with a self operated ticket machine at the front of the bus. At least there were no turnstiles. Translink’s Glider in Belfast got around the problem by installing ticket machines at the ‘tram like’ bus stops and in any event by their introduction in 2018, smartcards had become a thing.

I see Mayor Rotheram is hyping up the planned introduction of similar buses for the Liverpool City Region and quoting “the 18 metre, articulated vehicle can carry around 30% more passengers than an average double decker bus”. What he doesn’t say is those 30% extra passengers will be standing, not sitting. Maybe that won’t matter when passengers are travelling to John Lennon Airport, Anfield or Bramley Moore but it won’t go down well when making longer journeys around the Region – something I found when using the Glider route – it’s not pleasant to stand for so long.

The Mayor’s assurances have a familiar ring to London Transport’s enthusiasm for the introduction of the Merlins in 1968 as Matthew chronicles.

Matthew’s book will not only appeal to those with a thirst for the detailed history of which London bus routes succumbed to Merlin operation as well as lists of vehicle types, garages which operated them, disposal lists and life after LT but also to those with a more general interest in how decisions are made in a large organisation such as London Transport and why things go wrong.

As you can see, the 152 page book is fully illustrated with excellent photographs depicting every type of Merlin at work on the routes operated.

It’s also a very readable chronological account of the decade or so spanning this sad and sorry tale. Aside from the detailed Appendices the book ends with a fascinating six page “Afterword” written by Ken Blacker (a former London Transport manager) looking back on how and why this “unhappy era in London’s transport history” arose.

The book has been produced to the high standards one expects from Capital Transport and is well worth the £30 cover price, especially if you were a 14 year old schoolboy living in Winchmore Hill at the time.

Roger French

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