Full steam ahead for the slow coach to London

To celebrate her 80th birthday, Elizabeth the steam bus will be making the arduous journey to London for the second time in her life. And with a top speed of 50mph it means the journey will take 10 days, with overnight stops, to complete before she arrives in the capital to take part in the Lord Mayor’s Show.

Owners Vernon and Viv Smith and Vernon’s son 21-year-old Vernon Jnr were invited after appearing in last year’s show by prospective Lord Mayor of London Alderman David Wootton, who has Yorkshire roots, having been born in Bradford.

Elizabeth now enjoys the status of being the world’s only commercially operated steam bus and is a familiar sight on the streets of Whitby where she plies her trade for tourists.

She should take the journey in her stride, Mr Smith predicting that the first few miles between Whitby and Pickering, along the long steep section of Blue Bank, will prove the toughest part of the journey.

“People often ask what they are worth in monetary terms – we say it depends which way you look at it,” said Mr Smith, who says he will be doing most of the coal shovelling on the long haul south.

“They are either priceless or worthless because you can’t put a price on them. It has become our way of life. It’s seven days a week, it’s full on, relentless and in fact you get to a stage where you are so conditioned to doing it that when winter comes and you have time on your hands you start to worry about what you are going to do.”

The Smith family also operate Charlotte the charabanc, a four-litre, 17 horsepower bus manufactured in 1929, and the pair seem to have a universal appeal for both young and old.

Mr Smith, who was the driver of the Hogwart’s Express when the first Harry Potter movie was filmed on the railway at Goathland Station, said: “We have built something that’s turned out to be phenomenally bigger than I could have ever dreamed of, obviously it has helped the way that people have taken these two little characters on.

“She’s a grand old lady; children absolutely adore her. The nice thing about it is that I’m 51 and I can remember my mum to get me to wave at trains, that largely doesn’t happen any more yet children wave at our bus without being prompted.

“There must be something special that they recognise. Parents tell us that their children wake them up at five o’clock asking if Elizabeth is out yet.”

Last year Elizabeth went down to London on the back of a low loader but this year she will be taking the open road. Her last such journey was when she was driven north to Middlesbrough in 1948 to work for new owners.

A back-up van will be needed to feed her insatiable appetite for coal and water, the van also acting as a mobile workshop to cope with potential breakdowns, as well as towing a water bowser.

Every day she will consume seven hundredweight, or 350 kilos of coal, as well as using more than 600 gallons or 2,700 litres of water to make her journey.

It begins on November 2 with a reception at Cross Butts Restaurant Whitby. The National Railway Museum at York will provide a welcome overnight berth for Elizabeth following her trip across the North York Moors.

The relatively short hop to Leeds on November 3 will see Elizabeth spend the day as a guest of Leeds City Council on display in the main shopping area where she is expected to attract much attention.

A quick scurry to Bradford on November 4 and Elizabeth will take up a booked spot in Centenary Square outside the City Hall for a reception with the Lord Mayor of Bradford, Coun Naveeda Ikram.

On the 5th she goes to Burton upon Trent taking in Halifax and Huddersfield during that journey, spending two night at the National Brewery Centre. She then takes a south east course on November 7 travelling via Tamworth and Coventry before arriving in Rugby, where as a guest of bus operator Stagecoach, she will run one of their service bus routes in the town, no doubt taking many locals by surprise.

The return to London, where she spent much of her working life, will see the party head for the London Transport Museum’s Acton Depot, where the vehicle will pause on November 8 – before she finally up her position towards the front of the Lord Mayor’s Parade on the 12th.

Vehicle began life as lorry

Elizabeth began life as a lorry manufactured by a company called Sentinel in Shrewsbury.

She was used to haul cement in London until 1948 and ended her industrial working days as a tar sprayer.

As motoring technology advanced, she ended up in a scrapyard and was rescued in 1962, with Vernon Smith buying her in her original form as a flat-bed waggon.

Two teacher friends, who were experts in metalworking and woodwork skills, then created the bus body and Mr Smith found his way through a bureaucratic quagmire to eventually gain a vehicle special order, signed off by the Secretary of State for Transport, which allowed him to operate the bus commercially.

She may appear an anachronism, but Sentinel was still making steam-driven waggons into the 1950s, and they have the advantage over modern counterparts of being easy to repair and maintain. One major problem though, is their lack of flexibility – once the boiler is lit it cannot be switched off, unlike petrol or diesel engines.