How many Routemaster bus seats would it take to fill Wembley Stadium? A strong contender has emerged for an addition to The Register Standards Soviet's list of officially approved weights and measures: the Routemaster Fleet. In a tweet yesterday, a secondhand printer cartridge company said: "There were a combined total of 184,064 seats within the Original Routemaster Fleet. That's enough seats …
After playing with the unit convertor I'm deeply confused by there being two different units for volume. Namely the Bulgarian airbag and the Bulgarian funbag. I'm guessing that "jub" the unit of weight is derived from one of these two but which? I'm leaning towards "Bulgarian funbag" but conceded I'm going to have to spend a lot of time researching this.
TRSS (The Register Standards Soviet) has gone lazy!
The only correct way to solve this, is to
1. define a Standard Routemaster Bus having e.g. 64.2 seats (or whatever the average turns out to be)
2. define a Standard Routemaster fleeet size somewhere in the 2800s
3. Multiply these to get the Standard Routemaster Fleeet Seat Count (SRFSC)
We then can compare 1 SRFSC to Wembley Stadium.
Paris, because she is such a well-defined standard
See Iris Wildthyme.
note: being a Tardis it can simultaneously be both spherical and bus-shaped.
For maintenance, LT used to have a "float" system, with extra busses that lived as parts in the garage and that could then be swapped around to make sure the full service allocation of busses were available. It meant that buses could be completely serviced in less than a day - when in reality it was a completely different chassis, engine, brakes and so on, with only the body (and it's licence) that came in. This may be where the discrepancy comes in - TfL saying how many buses they licensed for use, while the Routemaster Association are saying how many were actually constructed.
More info -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldenham_Works
Think the Routemaster Association might be closer. The final 500 London Routemasters were longer, having 72 seats, which adds 4000 seats. And TFL's total doesn't include at least 100 Routemasters sold to other companies (eg Northern General and British European Airways), which gives you roughly another 6000 seats. I'll get my coat!
OK, we're looking for 8000 missing seats, think I can help.
1) Just over 500 London Routemasters were 72 not 64 seaters, that gets us around 4000 extra seats.
2) TFL didn't include around 100 Routemasters were sold to other companies like Northern General and BEA (for Heathrow Airport runs), that's another 6000, say.
I'd be willing to bet Wembley Stadium can hold a shitload more seats than 180000 if you just dumped them in through the whole in the top rather than unbolting the existing seats and replacing them with Routemaster seats.
Quantifying volume in seats seems a bit hopeless so this is a non-starter for the Reg Standards.
Well the seating capacity, if you want to watch a load of overpaid drama queens fall over while attempting to kick a ball, is 90,000, but I think that is more to do with how quickly they can get people out of through fire exits than the actual amount of space for seats.
----> "Is that because they were bolted down?"
WHAT!? What namby-pamby part of the country you from?
NOTHING stopped them from being nicked off the buses when I was a lad. Spent many a trip home from Stratford-upon-Avon squatting on the frame where there used to be a seat.....
I always wondered how they got the seats off the bus though.... big pockets?
And a darn sight cheaper than that cough-cough part work that is being advertised on TV at the moment. £1.99 for part 1 and the bits of the bonnet. I shudder to think how much the whole bus will cost. All I can say for sure that it is an order of magnitide cheaper than the plastic glue together kit I received one Christmas as a lad.
"I shudder to think how much the whole bus will cost. "
If that's the Italian sounding "magazine" company I think you are referring to, it could easily end up costing £100s to get the complete model. You could probably buy a scrapped full size one for the same price :-)
Oh, but you miss the point of partworks. The price is worth it to those who will spend the next couple of years patiently collecting the bits, making miniature discarded Macca's bags and 1960s Playboy magazines to place on the seats and generally having a great time showing each other what they can get up to with their dremels.
And that's from someone who has built the James Bond DB5, Milennium Falcon, BTTF De Lorean, 1/3 scale R2-D2 and even the Solar System Orrery (which almost did for me, TBH)
For these technical questions, one should always go to the definitive source:
https://shop.lego.com/en-CA/London-Bus-10258
Depending on what the capacity of the pair of sideways seats over the real wheels is (3 or 4 each), the number of seats is either 62 or 64. There, resolved. :-)
I completed bag set 3 of 4 a while ago. More building later today.
Sirs
I cannot find reference in your calculations accounting for correction of summation when taking consideration of the seating capacity of the whole fleet, on which the premise of over-fill of Wembley Stadium is based, the differences in seating capacity of the short wheel base Routmaster buses and other wheel bases produced. Such calculation most obviously, you will no doubt agree as being most learned, will also allow for corrections for the loss of seating to luggage space to special editions, ('peculiars'), occasionally produced at each wheel base, with other considerations to be taken in to account, as/below, although one can never forget the original London Transport bendy-bus when they attempted to articulate a Routmaster with the addition of a trailing car.
[I don't have knowledge as to if this special 'bendy' was ever put into service, (beyond trials), and therefore thought is to be discounted from the grand totalisation of seats to Wembley - ? (Citation needed as they say at Wikithingy)]
Further:
I do hope the following has also been accounted for:
1: It is well known that special editions occasionally had peculiar seating layouts, the most widely known being the frontal common bench seat on the lower deck which was fixed with back of seat to car front bulkhead, (ie back of bench to direction of travel), and stretched across the full width of the car.
2: In an effort to 'modernise' London Transport, (or LGBT as they are known these days), started to modify the fleet and began introducing silly folding doors to stop you having fun jumping on and off bus*. Such doors would turn up in various forms to the Routmaster fleet fixed into the near side of the vehicle and usually doing-away with the proper jumping on/off platform to the rear nearside corner, (however where kept, the rear platform also had its own folding door so that was buggered again), all variants obviously having an affect on the available seating area v/v the standard bus layout.
(*THAT is why we lost The Empire).
All is a matter of prime importance when calculating the red shift.
Yours, hoping to get out more with my bus pass, [on a Number 9, (other proper Routmaster services like the 15 are available), up and down Trafalgar Square/Cannon Street&The Tower], and write more long sentences,
Spence K. (67 & a bit) rtd./aka. cured.
The Hovel,
Somewhere-in-England.
SK3 9RH.
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