Saturday afternoon I took a break with my son and drove to the transport museum in nearby St Helens.
In Lancashire you are surrounded by the ghosts of the industrial technology and its subsequent technical progress, not least in aviation. St Helens itself was where float glass was invented, the means by which every window you see around you nowadays was made.
This bus is from up the road in Leyland, a place latterly famous for the production of commercial vehicles and whose museum still includes Rudolf Diesel's prototype engine.
Like phone-boxes, UK buses are legendary, and this prototype is the evolutionary equivalent of the 'missing link' betwixt ape and man.
It has the open rear-end which I used to leap on and off at speed enroute to school, but instead of the forward-mounted engine and drive-shaft, its power unit has been relocated to the rear.
This optimised the use of space, shifted the weight to the rear axle where it was most needed and made access for maintenance altogether simpler.
As a result, engines in buses have largely stayed there ever since.
We do stuff, hereabouts.
