Exclusive! E101/9 on Route 12

November 5th 2011 saw Route 12 pass from a bendy bus operation to a double deck operation within Camberwell Garage. This was part of a scheme from mayor Boris Johnson to take all bendy buses off the road and add some new double decker buses for all routes apart from the 507/521. Route 12 was given a mixture of Volvo B5LH Hybrid's and Volvo B9TL's all in a Gemini 2 body. And quite an extreme PVR increase from 28 to 41 buses. Ever since Route 12's hybrids have not intermixed on any other day time route apart from Route X68 when no other spares were in the garage last week. 

The 31st March 2012 saw a massive change within Go-Ahead London's services down south. These changes involved three garages. Camberwell, Stockwell and Merton. These changes happened due to the successful gain of Routes 19/N19 and 249. Both Stockwell and Merton Garages needed more space to accommodate for both Routes (19/N19 to Stockwell with a PVR of 26 buses and Route 249 to Merton Garage with a PVR of 12 buses). In effect to these routes arriving and lack of space Routes 345 (Stockwell) and 355 (Merton) were pushed out of their garages and moved into Camberwell Garage. Coincedently these buses had the same PVR of both recently gained routes which had moved into their previous garages. 

Anyway, the garage transfer saw Route 345 bring along the unwanted Enviro 400's to Camberwell Garage which they have been trying to avoid for years! 

The problem with the Enviro400's when they arrived was that they were still fitted with Stockwell Garage blinds (all routes apart from Route 19) and whenever a spare bus was needed Camberwell garage did not make such a nice appearance with the blinds with these Enviro400's. Here is a link to Go Ahead London's E128 which went out on Route X68 with some horrendous duck taped blinds. But it is understandable why Camberwell Garage did do this as powerblinds (which the 345's batch of Enviro400's use) do cost a lot more money. 

In early August 2012, Camberwell decided to update the powerblinds on the batch of Enviro400's so that they could intermix on other routes. Now with the blinds updated on most Enviro 400's within the garage they have started to bounce around a bit more routes within the garage. Surprisingly, the first one to be intermixed was found on Route 185. This was E106. The picture can be found in one of the older posts on this blog (100,000th view one). The 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th were all intermixed on the 28th August 2012 all on Route 12 but one transferred to Route 68 later on during the day.  But here is an image on E101 in service with Route 12. I have to say it does look very weird upon the route but its very nice to see something other than a Volvo bus upon the route.

More Images From the Day

Thanks for reading the post and I hope you have thoroughly enjoyed the post.

Produced By George Reed, Rhys Daniel and Lawrence Abel