Although primarily a train man, I'm interested in all forms of transport. I have been a regular bus user my whole life and currently commute most days on a Stagecoach express service. My grandfather Tom Fraser drove buses around Fife for 30 years and was based at the Lochgelly depot. He retired when I was five and a half years old but I vaguely remember him going past our house on the Kirkcaldy run. The Scottish Vintage Bus Museum is located at Lathalmond, between Dunfermline and Kelty. An annual running weekend is staged in August and I took my folks along to witness the spectacle.
You can visit the museum sheds on Sundays from the start of April until the end of September. Admission includes the option of a guided tour around the site and a ride in a heritage bus. A handful of special events are staged throughout the season, such as classic car shows, trucking displays and a wartime themed day. The museum's own extravaganza features many visiting buses over two days. Vintage vehicles provide a free shuttle service to and from Dunfermline and there are other excursions available. Today we opted to drive directly to the site as my father is a wheelchair user and this was the most convenient method of transport. I had previously attended the open weekend on a couple of occasions, as well as the historic car show and was therefore familiar with the general layout. The ground is flat and wide tarmac roads link the various buildings. Ideal for disabled visitors. The admission charge was £10 (concessions £8) and we were able to drive right into the complex and park up. The site was formerly a Royal Navy stores depot and now functions as a commerce park. The bus museum occupies the greater part of the grounds and has 45 acres of space to play with. The vast area and relative proximity to the M90 make Lathalmond an ideal location for a heritage transport facility. We began our visit by entering the main exhibition hall. The collection consists of around 150 buses and a couple of dozen examples - from 1920 until fairly recent times - are formally displayed in the public shed. My parents recognised many of the models and the liveries they sported. Some of the buses also looked familiar to me. Well, it is now 40 years since I started secondary school. The shed also contained a couple of other vehicle types, including a steamroller manufactured in 1930. It spent its working life on the streets of Edinburgh and was retired as late as 1989. The roller is destined to remain indoors for the foreseeable future as the required boiler repairs would cost upwards of £50,000. Lurking in the corner within a mocked-up garage was a Ford Escort Mark II, a car that was as common as muck when I was a kid. Rather sobering to now see it as a museum piece. Glass cases were dotted around the hall, showing various items of public transport paraphernalia. The huge indoor space also contains the café and shop. We wandered along to the adjacent shed, used as a workshop. It was easy enough pushing the wheelchair on the hard surface but we had to periodically switch to the grass in order to let buses through. Internal tours of the compound were available, in addition to the scheduled runs on public roads.
Buses in various stages of dismantlement were on display inside the second hall. Normally this would be a busy working environment but today the tools had been laid down and the vehicles roped off to allow safe visitor access. Outside, people waited by the turning circle to board running services. Retro-style timetables had been pasted up next to the stops. It struck me that you didn't actually need to be super interested in buses (or public transport in general) to enjoy an event like this. The whole place was a hive of activity and the sights and sounds of the classic traction was an attraction in itself. A truly immersive experience. And yes, the smells were part of the equation too. These ancient engines are capable of pumping out a fair cloud of reek! Newer models were also doing the rounds, including a double decker from Hong Kong. Many other buses were parked on the adjoining grassy field. I assumed some of them were privately owned and here for the day. Several had the front door open and the public were invited to view the interior. There were a handful of other conveyances such as fire engines and breakdown trucks. An autonomous electric bus was also on display, as was a model painted in the pride colours. I believe there was an accessible single decker doing the internal circuit but Dad was happy to view the action from the roadside. I had been on trips during my previous visits and wasn't desperate to jump aboard today. Instead, we headed to the café for a snack. The Scottish Vintage Bus Museum was founded in 1988 and the original premises were located near Whitburn, West Lothian. Three acres of hard standing was available and 40 buses could be accommodated under cover. Open days were launched and the success of the venture saw the museum outgrow its first home. By the mid-90s, a new site was actively being sought and the recently-closed Navy depot at Lathalmond caught the attention of the trustees. An offer to purchase just over half the military site was accepted and the museum now had quadruple the amount of indoor storage space for vehicles. Only eight of the Lathalmond fleet are owned by the museum itself. The remainder are stabled on behalf of external concerns. All staff donate their labour on a voluntary basis. We still had one thing left on the agenda. A hooter blasted in the distance. Ah yes, the heritage railway. The Shed 47 restoration group (now rebranded as Lathalmond Railway Museum) began life in 1997 within the original Royal Navy loco workshop. The depot once had a vast internal rail network and a connection to a local freight line was in place until the early 70s. The volunteer group - a tenant of the bus museum - has managed to build two working railways and diesel shunters offer brake van rides along a length of standard gauge track that reaches the far corner of the site. The trip takes three minutes each way. A permanent platform has been constructed and named Lathalmond Halt. The ticket office and shop has a small exhibition on the history of industrial operations and general railway history in the far West Fife area. Various rail-served pits and quarries dotted the early 20th-century landscape and this extant transport network proved highly useful when the Navy stores depot was established during WW2.
Rosyth Dockyard was now linked to Lathalmond by rail and could be quickly restocked in the event of serious damage due to enemy attack. Logistical operations were switched to road transport in the 1970s and by 1993 the storage operation closed as the Cold War subsided. Shed 47 opens in conjunction with the bus museum and I've rocked up a couple of times before and ridden on the brake van. Today, I wheeled Dad up to the platform so he could watch the train depart. An industrial curio on site is the wartime railway weighbridge - the last working example in Scotland. The scales can handle wagons up to 48 tons. The Lathalmond crew began the ambitious construction of a narrow gauge line in 2016. Named as the West of Fife Munitions Railway, passengers can travel from Lathalmond Lower Halt to the site limits behind a mini diesel locomotive that formerly served at a peat works in Midlothian. The carriages are sometimes pulled by Big Dave - a steam engine funded by donations and built from scratch in 2021 at Darlington. It's great to see the railway operation continually expanding at Lathalmond and it adds an extra dimension to what is already a fantastic day out. It really is worth going along to the open weekend.
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