The 1978 Commercial Motor Show.

In 1978, the Commercial Motor was combined with the car Motor Show at the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) in Birmingham. This was the first time that the Motor Show had been seen at a venue outside of London, and the well publicised event drew people in their thousands.

This is WMPTE Metrobus 6835 on the Metro-Cammell-Weymann stand at that very show. At the time, four of these Metrobus Mk1s (6831-6834) had already entered service with WMPTE. However, 6835 was a radical departure from the others (and indeed from the standard PTE buses of the day) because it had a completely redesigned interior. For the first time, here was a design that broke away from the traditional 1960s Birmingham City Transport style interior of two-tone blue Formica panels and red Rexene seats. Instead all seats were trimmed in an orange and black patterned moquette, and the lightly coloured daisy-patterned Formica interior paneling gave the bus a cleaner and more airy feel.

By giving 6835 a brighter and friendlier feel, the PTE hoped to encourage more people to travel on their buses, but in particular women, as 70% of passengers carried at the time were women. While engineers and platform staff had their reservations, the travelling public welcomed the changes, and all future WMPTE orders specified this type of interior.

After 20 years of service, 6835 was retired from traffic after a gearbox failure while working out of West Bromwich in 1998, thus making it the last of the original five prototype Metrobuses to come out of service. Fortunately, the bus went straight from service into preservation and was the first Metrobus to ba saved for posterity. The bus then underwent an extensive rebuild with the West Midlands Bus Presevation Society. However, unfinished, 6835 later changed hands and now resides at the Midland Bus Museum at Wythall, Birmingham. Further work has been done to complete the project, and hopefully she’ll be finished in 2010; looking something like she did back in 1978. All very fitting, as the last of the West Midlands Metrobuses are due to be withdrawn by their current owners, National Express.