Guy Arab Mk III (1948)

Registration: AWG 393.
Fleet number: RO607 (W. Alexander &amp; Sons, Fife).
Preserved at: Scottish Vintage Bus Museum (SVBM), Lathalmond, Fife.
Owner: I Allan, Dunfermline.

When I was a boy in the 1950s, blue was my favourite colour and I loved blue buses, especially this type. I longed to have a ride on one and I hoped that one day it would happen. But it never did. We weren’t allowed to board the blue buses where I lived.

Standing at a bus stop in the pouring rain (no bus shelters in those days), waiting for a Glasgow Corporation bus to take us into the city centre. Watching the lovely blue buses pass us by, some almost empty, heading for the Dundas Street bus station.

Buses that came in to the city from outside Glasgow, places like Dunfermline for instance, were not allowed to pick up passengers, only to drop them off.

I used to beg my mother to go by bus to Fife when we visited relatives, knowing full well it would be a blue bus. But we always took the train from Glasgow to Edinburgh, then on to Fife. But my disappointed soon changed to delight as we crossed the magnificent Forth Bridge.

Fast foward 65+ years later and I still haven’t had a ride on a Guy Arab bus! Oh, I was all over this one like a rash taking photographs, but later I missed out. Apparently this bus was used to carry museum visitors back to Dunfermline, I had got on another vintage bus, a flatnose, I call them. Engine at the back, no character at the front.