Twickenham Garage in the summer of 1992 at the beginning of a long restoration project.

As a condition of the sale Blue Triangle made the bus fit to travel and two weeks later it was driven to its new home at the Routemaster Heritage Trust's premises, the former LT Twickenham garage. A restoration plan was devised in which Paul Morris from Cobham Bus Museum would do the mechanical work and I would tackle the bodywork. I had never done anything like this before so I learned as as went. Repaneling a Routemaster is fairly straight forward as the lower panels are simply screwed on and there is rarely any trouble with the underlying framework. panels that weren't replaced were stripped back to bare metal.

During its time in Glasgow the bus received a number of modifications including the fitting of a more effective heating system and a one-piece windscreen. As the aim was to restore 291 as closely as possible to its original appearance all of the mods were undone. In those days there were rows of withdrawn RMs at LT Bus Sales just down the road at Fulwell. From there I obtained an original style windscreen from RMC 1508 and various fittings from former showbus RM 14 which sadly had major rear end damage.

After two years of hard work the bus was finally ready for painting. I decided to have a go at this myself after taking advice from the experts to see how it should be done. I took three weeks off work in April 1994 for this task and I am quite pleased with the finished result.

April 1994

By this time LT had sold Twickenham garage for redevelopment so we all moved to a temporary home at Norbiton garage which was also due for demolition. Norbiton was huge, it had been totally rebuilt in 1984 at a cost of 4 million pounds but only lasted a further six years! We were only supposed to occupy a small corner of the site but the rest of the building made a good test track.

Over the Norbiton inspection pit. August 1994

In August 1994 I took the bus for its MOT which it passed without a hitch and a few days later it appeared at its first rally, Bus of Yesteryear at Staines.

There was no progress on the bus for the next two years as by now I had bought SMS 369 and all my spare time was spent on its restoration. Work recommenced on the RM in October 1996, The upper deck interior was completely gutted for a thorough restoration. The ceiling was repainted, sides panels re-rexined and new Treadmaster flooring fitted. The seat frames were also re-painted and the upholstery cleaned. Around this time I also bought an AEC AV690 (11.3 litre) engine to replace the original AV590 unit. I finaly got round to fitting the new engine in September 1998. I haven't had a chance to try it out on the road yet but in conjunction with a higher-ratio diff (to be fitted sometime in the future) it should significantly improve the performance of the bus.

The last major job outstanding was the restoration of the lower deck interior. I started this at the beginning of October and it was finished by the end of May 1999.