Excellent website. Ribble's Park Royal-bodied AN68s are my favourite buses ever. To see them in such pristine condition makes me want to weep.
As a kid from Waterloo, the Ribble AN68s were our bread-and-butter buses. They seemed extraordinary advanced and modern compared to the austere-looking PD3/5s, and suited the corporate livery very well.
They served Ribble's (and North Western's) operations very well for over 20 years. Much missed.
I always liked the orange seats on the later batch!! It made the interiors look a little more airey and modern for some reason. Upstairs, though, the seats were sometimes replaced by plain orange hard plastic...things, in a vain attempt to discourage vandalism. I still remember the top deck of a PR AN68 burnt out at Waterloo Interchange one day in the mid-80s.
The gear stick was mounted on its' own pedestal, the same as a Leopard, as opposed to possibly every other rear-engined bus on Merseyside which shared the gear-selector with the steering column. Because drivers' left foot had nothing to do, they would often rest it on top of the front windscreen grill.
Bootle's Atlanteans were fitted with PTE Ultimate ticket machines, whereas Aintree still used the Setright ticket dispensers - probably because once a bus left the Merseyside boundary there were about 1,000 different fare types to whatever destination they were going. Oddly enough, this never bothered the Bootle-operated 351 to Ormskirk. I still remember getting on at Ormskirk bus station one day and paying a child 13p ticket back to Waterloo. Driver didn't seem to care.
Vandalism on the L81 Thornton-Skelhorne Street service meant Atlanteans that worked the route were fitted with a security door to prevent people going upstairs after 7pm. When an Atlantean was unavailable, or a driver refused to take one out, the route was operated by either National 2s or ancient REs borrowed from Aintree. A special adaptor plate was attached to the Setright fare machine to allow Ultimate units to be used.
Back then Bootle was basically a PTE depot operated by Ribble. Did any Crosville depots use PTE ultimates?
On the Ribble Atlateans the gearshift in later life made a terrible screeching sound though, something to do with being non-electric?
As I said the second batch I didnt like as much, much duller, the black gasket around the windows made them look just as worse outside the bus