English: Preserved
Greater Manchester Transport bus 4002 (reg. ANE 2T), a 1979
Leyland Titan (B15), pictured in Car Park No. 2 of
Sportcity,
Manchester, for the
SELNEC Preservation Society's
40 Years of SELNEC event.
4002 was the 48th production Titan, part of the the early batch built by the British Leyland subsidiary Park Royal Vehicles in Park Royal, London (later ones were built at Leyland's expanded factory in the Lillyhall Industrial Estate, Workington). It's one of the very few Titans that were not built for London Transport as part of their dual door T-class, instead being delivered new to Greater Manchester Transport, the local authority operator covering the Greater Manchester conurbation. Unlike the London buses, it had a single door layout giving 47 seats upstairs, 26 down, and used a three piece destination display (the London ones being a single unit taking up nearly the whole front as indicated by the panel indentation). The staircase was also further forward, meaning they didn't have the small window on the lower deck over the driver's side wheel arch.
GMT took a total of 15 Titans and numbered in the series 4001-4015 (but with various registrations due to production delays). These delays meant they didn't receive their full initial order of 35, and declined to order any more. The Titans that did arrive were painted in a variation of the fleet livery using a single white band, as opposed to the more universal double band, which was also applied to most of their MCW Metrobuses.
Being a non-standard group, the entire fleet of 15, plus other non-standard buses, were withdrawn on the day the authority's bus division was separated into an arms length company (GM Buses) as part of bus deregulation, on 26 Oct 1986. In March 1987 4002 was sold to The Wright Company of Hexham, who operated it in their blue, red & white livery. In 1991 it was purchased by Liverpool based Aintree Coachline who operated it in their red & cream livery.
On 1 Jan 2005 it was purchased for preservation by the SELNEC Preservation Society. After a comprehensive restoration begun in January 2008, it was brought back to its original as delivered condition. It was 'semi-launched' at this SELNEC 40 event, and then after some further work, was formally launched on 28th March 2010 at the Museum of Transport Spring Transport Festival, followed by an article in the June 2010 edition of
Bus & Coach Preservation (Volume 13, No. 1).