buses in London carry a roll of blinds showing all routes worked from a specific garage.
It is customary to show on top the route number and certain 'via' points, and the destination at the bottom.
It is not often that blinds are fitted the wrong way round.
The occasion is the transfer of the buses used by route 61 in Orpington to Westbourne Park garage for a service increase on route 31[ extended to S. Bush].
Those buses are volvos B7s with plaxton president bodies.
Here is VT32112 showing the new allocation, route 31's extension, and a rare example of blinds fitted wrong way round.
taken today at 1530 in very dim light!
The two blind sets [the one containing the route numbers and the one containing the destinations] are of the same size, so, unless you 'unfold' the roll of blinds [that's how they are fitted], you can not tell which roll is which.
A good blind fitter would check BEFORE fitting a set of blinds to a bus. The guy who fitted the blinds to this bus did not check. Ah, well!
If I'm not wrong, Westbourne Park garage has been ISO9001 approved. That means at least two staff members were violating the procedure:
- the one who fitted the blind
- the one who let the bus went out to service
