Froggy55:
Thanks! I always thought that registration numbers were given for the life of a vehicle, wherever it moved to in the UK. Could you please tell me how it is that many buses are re-registered? Complete rebuilding, maybe?
The main reason they use cherished numbers is to disguise the age of the coach. Some hirers, like cruiselines, demand that the coaches are no older than 3/4 years. With the average coach costing new somewhere around £250k you can imagine that not a lot of companies will have a largely brand new fleet to offer the cruise companies, especially not at the rates they are prepared to pay. There are so many different bodies fitted to chassis’s that (unless you were a geek like me) you couldn’t tell the age of the coach by looking at it if is not identifiable by the reg no.
On a separate note there were a large number of ex MOD coaches that were brought back to the UK when the overseas bases closed and sold that were given new reg’s applicable to the year they were sold and not the year the were supplied to the MOD. You therefore had coaches that were manufactured in the early 90’s that, if they had been used by other than the MOD, would have been on K/L plates being given 03/04 plates. The operators who were bound by local authorities to provide school buses of no older than 12 years snapped them up and got a further 10 years out of them. Nobody was any the wiser and in some instances even the operators didn’t know - they thought they were getting a great deal. Baffling but true 