Kowloon Motor Bus Company (1933) Limited 2L49 (BE 3615) - former Ribble 1638 (NCK 627)

Kowloon Motor Bus Company (1933) Limited 2L49 (BE 3615) was new as Ribble Motor Services 1638 (NCK 627) in February 1960. It was a boyhood favourite of mine assigned to Blackburn garage and it regularly worked the service into Rochdale where I lived.

After sale by Ribble, KMB acquired the bus from W North (a dealer in Sherburn in Elmet, South Yorkshire) in May 1973 and it entered service with KMB in October that year. It was subsequently scrapped in 1977.

The KMB fleet numbering system featured a letter indicating the chassis manufacturer followed by the number. The secondhand buses acquired from the UK during the time when newly built deliveries were slow were prefixed '2'. The letter 'L' beneath the driver's windscreen indicates that this bus was allocated to Lai Chi Kok Depot. That depot in Po Lun Street, where the photo was taken on the rooftop parking area, was built in 1965 but in 2002 was replaced by another site in Hing Wah Street West near the shipyard waterfront. Both garages were built on a multi-storey parking principle. (Photos on this site: www.gakei.com/lck/lck.htm )
The Po Lun Street site was redeveloped as Manhattan Hill, a six tower high rise development.

At some point I wrote to KMB and received a very courteous reply to my request for a photograph of the bus in Hong Kong. I was sent the enclosed photograph and I have always been grateful to Tang Shiu-kin, one of the founder members of KMB for his helpfulness.

It is hard to believe the bus is the same as the one in the previous photograph. There has been quite a lot of modification to nearly all the windows.