Bad stuff we did on buses as kids.

[Ken H]

DO NOT DO THIS STUFF!!!

I grew up in Leeds in 60's & 70's so lots of back loader buses with no doors.

A dare that did the rounds was to stand on the platform with your arms round the centre pole and swing 360 degrees round it while the bus was moving! I tried it and fell in the gutter. Nice evening spent picking gravel out if my skin with tweezers.
But kids fell off the back loaders a lot. There was a discussion about it on a Leeds FB group and many admitted to it. Even little Jo*** who retired recently as a primary school head!

Another was to sit upstairs on the back seat with an arm down the stairwell. Then you could reach the winder for the destination. On the way down stairs one could also give the number winder a tweak if you were quick!

Some kids chucked fireworks out of upstairs windows. The emergency exit at the back seemed made for this. But I never did that (saintly expression).

 

[61653 HTAFC]

Worst I ever did was a sneaky cig on the top deck. Though another trick I witnessed but didn't do was to tape down (or wedge down with a bit of paper and bubblegum) the bell buttons so that the bell rang constantly. Cue the driver having to check every button to find which one had been tampered with, inevitably it was right at the back of the top deck!

 

[Taunton]

Now Western National in a small Somerset town couldn't have had much trouble, surely. I am (slightly) embarrassed to report ...


Ding-Ding on the bell when first getting off at the back, with the rest of your mates (plus the public) to follow.

Taking an unguarded spare ticket roll from under the stairs and then streaming it from the upstairs ventilators.

Lit banger in the platform used ticket box when getting off on November 5th.

Small screwdriver, unscrewing the "Stubber" on the seatback in front, screwing it back on upside down.

There was a longrunning advert above the front upstairs windows, with a photo of a man's face. Chewing gum chewed, rolled elongated, and put on as a moustache.

 

[geoffk]

As a kid I used to jump off between stops. We all did it and I don't remember any of my mates being injured. We just learnt the right way to do it. Jumping on was a bit more difficult and it was usually done at traffic lights. I think we were fairly well behaved on the bus and our school uniform was a give-away to anyone who might report us. These were all service buses though and behaviour on school buses was often worse, e.g. eggs and bags of flour thrown around at the end of term, or seats thrown out of the top deck back window. Ah the stubber, were they only on ECW bodies?

 

[Ken H]

As a kid I used to jump off between stops. We all did it and I don't remember any of my mates being injured. We just learnt the right way to do it. Jumping on was a bit more difficult and it was usually done at traffic lights. I think we were fairly well behaved on the bus and our school uniform was a give-away to anyone who might report us. These were all service buses though and behaviour on school buses was often worse, e.g. eggs and bags of flour thrown around at the end of term, or seats thrown out of the top deck back window. Ah the stubber, were they only on ECW bodies?

I went to the Keighley bus Museum open day 2 weeks ago and got a ride on an old half cab single deck West Yorkshire Road Car Co. Stubbers at every seat. I think they were general on single deckers and top decks of double deckers. Coaches had ash trays that emptied the contents over your knees!

Edit - my pix added. Share as you like.

 

[fgwrich]

I used to enjoy sticking my head out of the windows of Bristol VRs - the sliders were just wide enough to do it!

 

[Tom Gallacher]

Where I grew up in Glasgow we had two bus services, the 19 that went from Drumchapel to Govan via the Clyde Tunnel and the 20 that went to Glasgow city centre. Both travelled as far as Anniesland Cross and then the 19 headed for the tunnel with the 20 continuing along Great Western Road. On the way home from school I (and others) used to change the destination screens (this was done through the flap in the upstairs front) so that the 19 bus would show as a 20 going to George Square and vice versa.

Yes, I was a bad boy growing up.

 

[pdeaves]

Double decker bus, upstairs. The bus passed over a railway bridge and all my 'friends' rushed to one side to see whatever train was approaching. The buss wobbled and stopped. The driver came upstairs to 'have words'.

 

[Busaholic]

London Transport red buses never had school bus routes in the 1950s and 60s, or even schoolday journeys on their ordinary routes, and the conductor was usually supervising the boarding and unloading at stops: even the rear blinds couldn't be accessed by passengers, but (in theory) the side via blind incorporating the route number could be wound round by an interloper, though I never saw it happen. The most daring thing we dared do was to remove our hated school caps for the duration of the journey: I've loathed headgear ever since!

 

[cnjb8]

Some kids brought fire crackers one time and kept setting them off on the bus, as you can imagine the driver was not happy, that’s the worst thing I can remember

 

[AM9]

Hopping on and off rear platform buses was the norm when I was at school. The RT platforms were well surfaced with knobbly rubber, but the trolleybuses (SA type on route 691 in my case) had a slatted wood floor. It could be a bit dangerous in the wet, especially in leather soled shoes! In town (Ilford in my case, there was enough traffic and traffic lights to be able to almost step off the platform as the bus went past the road that the bus stop 100yards away was meant to serve. In those days, school bus travel was on 'Half Passes' if you lived less than 3 miles from the school.
Some of the more foolhardy youths would ride cycles close behind buses because slipstreaming them saced a lot of eneregy. That became a challenge for some to try and get their front tyre to rub on the trim strip at the bottom of the rear. All hell broke loose if the bus slowed down quickly when the rider wasn't expecting it!

 

[175mph]

I think the worst I did was thumping dust out of the seating.

 

[Mcr Warrior]

Unscrewing the light bulbs on the upper deck of an ancient front-engined / rear-platformed Leyland Titan double decker and lobbing them out of the windows.

Double-dinging the bell at stops (as an instruction to the driver to restart the bus) before everyone had gotten on or off.

As a kid I used to jump off between stops. We all did it and I don't remember any of my mates being injured.

Usually saved a couple of hundred yards' walk on the way home in the afternoon on most schooldays.

Worst I ever did was a sneaky cig on the top deck.

Thriving secondary market in the re-sale of single ciggies on the top deck.

 

[61653 HTAFC]

Unscrewing the light bulbs on the upper deck of an ancient front-engined / rear-platformed Leyland Titan double decker and lobbing them out of the windows.

Sorry for mentioning this in the Buses section, but I'm told that in the days of the SWT slammers this was a favourite activity of the Godalming ASBO squad. I also nicked a couple of bulbs from the compartments, but only for use at home when I was a skint student!

 

[yorkie]

DO NOT DO THIS STUFF!!!

I grew up in Leeds in 60's & 70's so lots of back loader buses with no doors.

A dare that did the rounds was to stand on the platform with your arms round the centre pole and swing 360 degrees round it while the bus was moving! I tried it and fell in the gutter. Nice evening spent picking gravel out if my skin with tweezers.
But kids fell off the back loaders a lot. There was a discussion about it on a Leeds FB group and many admitted to it. Even little Jo*** who retired recently as a primary school head!

Another was to sit upstairs on the back seat with an arm down the stairwell. Then you could reach the winder for the destination. On the way down stairs one could also give the number winder a tweak if you were quick!

Some kids chucked fireworks out of upstairs windows. The emergency exit at the back seemed made for this. But I never did that (saintly expression).

Fortunately the current generation of youngsters are generally better behaved than your generation were

I find it funny when hear an older person complaining that kids these days did not behave as well as kids in the 60s/70s; posts like this demonstrate how untrue that is

 

[swt_passenger]

Not me but…

Pulling the points lever so a trolley bus and its pickup poles went in different directions at a junction…

 

[AM9]

Fortunately the current generation of youngsters are generally better behaved than your generation were

I find it funny when hear an older person complaining that kids these days did not behave as well as kids in the 60s/70s; posts like this demonstrate how untrue that is

I think there are many more opportunities for detecting bad behaviour and subsequently catching culprits with CCTV, emergency exit detectors, secure light fittings and driver operated destiantion displays etc., so the perpetrators are less likely to get away with it. Compare that to behaviour on stations where staff and cameras can't see everywhere and as a consequence, facilites either have to be 'hardened' against vandalism, or are withdrawn, - much to the chagrin of many posters on here.

 

[SteveM70]

I think the worst we got up to was throwing pint cartons of milk out of the back upstairs window. It used to make quite the mess

 

[Gloster]

Some of the more foolhardy youths would ride cycles close behind buses because slipstreaming them saced a lot of eneregy. That became a challenge for some to try and get their front tyre to rub on the trim strip at the bottom of the rear. All hell broke loose if the bus slowed down quickly when the rider wasn't expecting it!

Slipstreaming was common in the 1940s and 1950s according to my father, who cycled around London at the time. Plenty of buses had bike tyre marks on the back, but you had to to be careful if slipstreaming a trolleybus as they could brake very sharply.

 

[Pit_buzzer]

In 1973 the first Leyland nationals appeared on one of our regular buses to school, the route took it over a hump back bridge which set the air suspension bouncing and opened up the possibility of the 70+ kids taking control. So everyone crammed to the left, then to the right and got a real boat in a rough sea motion going. Some drivers just carried on regardless but on a least one occasion the rocking got so bad the driver pulled over and read the riot act.... Happy days!

 

[Gloster]

A story that is hearsay, but probably basically true. Around 1971 or 1972 a cousin of a school friend had a trick of jumping off double-deckers, probably London Country RTs, without standing on the platform: jump from the stairs or lower saloon and grab the pole, swing on that and then continue over to the pavement. He did it once too often, landed badly and broke his ankle (or similar). Until then he had been a promising young tennis player: this was no longer expected.

 

[Busaholic]

Fortunately the current generation of youngsters are generally better behaved than your generation were

I find it funny when hear an older person complaining that kids these days did not behave as well as kids in the 60s/70s; posts like this demonstrate how untrue that is

Kids will always be kids, there's no point in trying to differentiate the generations. What I would say has changed is that, as a generalisation, the kids of a few decades ago in the main either respected or were at least afraid of 'authority' figures, so the things that were done tended to be when no adult was in sight. Parents were also far stricter on the whole, and if you were caught doing something boisterous and anti-social you might get just as much grief from your parents.

I cannot imagine the situation then where, for instance, a child of six or seven would be allowed to so annoy a collection of bus passengers that an older woman of West Indian extraction amongst them remonstrated with it in moderation verbally, whereupon the child's mother, blissfully unconcerned up to then, started shouting at the older woman that she had no right to interfere or speak to her spoiled brat in any way, and demanded the bus stop and the police be called, which duly happened. I can honestly say that would NEVER have happened when I was growing up, and being from S.E. London I didn't grow up in a rarefied atmosphere: I was terrified of teddy boys when aged ten or eleven, and my community had plenty of them.

 

[Shimbleshanks]

As teenagers, a favourite way of passing the time for us back seat passengers on school coach trips in North Wales was to give a vigorous V-sign at groups of slightly older guys hanging around as we crawled through places like Bethesda or Caernarfon. Fortunately, they contented themselves with returning our gestures with interest rather than trying to catch up with and board the coach.

On a return visit a few years back, I sat opposite a local oik on the top deck of a service bus who repeatedly slid back the sliding window to shout; "Oi, Jones (or Davies, or Williams etc): You're gay!" whenever he spotted an acquaintance on the pavement. Glad to see that the youth of Anglesey has lost nothing in the sophistication of its wit during the intervening years...

 

[yorkie]

... the kids of a few decades ago in the main either respected or were at least afraid of 'authority' figures...

I don't see any evidence there was more respect back then, but I would agree there was a lot more fear.

 

[A0wen]

Surprised stink bombs haven't had a mention....

 

[Mcr Warrior]

Surprised stink bombs haven't had a mention....

All the smokers on the top deck were bad enough!

 

[61653 HTAFC]

I think there are many more opportunities for detecting bad behaviour and subsequently catching culprits with CCTV, emergency exit detectors, secure light fittings and driver operated destiantion displays etc., so the perpetrators are less likely to get away with it. Compare that to behaviour on stations where staff and cameras can't see everywhere and as a consequence, facilites either have to be 'hardened' against vandalism, or are withdrawn, - much to the chagrin of many posters on here.

I don't see any evidence there was more respect back then, but I would agree there was a lot more fear.

One big difference is that in the days of my parents' youth, any kid that went a bit far would be risking a clip round the ear from a bus driver. In my day, we'd be risking a shouting-at. Nowadays, any driver who tried to remonstrate with an unruly youth would be risking their own livelihood or safety- or at least that's the perception.

 

[Strathclyder]

Looking at all these replies, I was a saint when it came to bus travel in my youth lol Many of my classmates/people in my year, less so. Do recall a few occasions where the driver switched the engine off and refused to move any further until things calmed down.

 

[DunsBus]

One prank which backfired spectacularly happened twenty years ago in the run-up to Bonfire Night.

A youth saw a Lothian dual-door Trident sitting at the Silverknowes terminus and thought it would be a good idea to lob a firework through the open centre door. Unknown to him, the driver had used the staircase door to answer a call of nature with the help of a empty plastic bottle, saw what was going on and nipped upstairs.

Just as the youth was about to throw the firework, he got the contents of the now-full bottle emptied all over him from an upstairs window.

 

[ABB125]

These days there's very little opportunity to engage in "fun" activities on buses (or trains): interlocked doors, integrated light fittings etc. And most buses (at least, the ones I've travelled on) don't really fall apart these days, unlike perhaps in times gone by.
Of course, nowadays children are far more interested in what goes on on their phone screen; if I suggested to a group of people my age that we should all rush to one side of the bus at once, they'd just stare blankly at me! (This is fun to do on a Mk 1 DMU though!)

To answer the question, the naughtiest thing I've done on a bus is probably hit the seats to release dust on one of the coaches we used to have o take us swimming at first school about 10 years ago...

(The "naughtiest" thing I've seen a bus driver do is drive though town on the way home from school on a sweltering summer afternoon in the usual stop-start 5mph average speed traffic with the door open. This was on an early 2000s Optare Solo which we had for a week (on a school contract) whilst the usual driver (and their coach) was on holiday.)