Engineer Stories

Grahame Park

Grahame ParkGrahame Park is a chassis cleaner at Arriva London’s Norwood depot. He started driving Routemasters in 1985 with London Regional Transport. Grahame is also a qualified printer, and previously worked for the MoD, printing classified manuals for military vehicles, but he’s not allow to talk about that.

What he did tell us though, is that being taken to the cinema for the first time and seeing Cliff Richard driving a red double decker bus in the film ‘Summer Holiday’ was what gave him his desire to be a bus driver.

In 2001, having driven one person operated buses for a few years, Grahame decided he would like to change from shift work to regular hours, and applied for the Chassis Cleaner position at Norwood.

A PCV licence is a requirement for the job so he still gets to drive buses around the garage.

And since 2006, with the creation of The Arriva Heritage Fleet (nine Routemasters used for Rallies and Corporate and Personal celebrations www.thearrivaheritagefleet.com ), Grahame has maintained his interest as a volunteer, driving the Routemasters at weekends and public holidays.

He is also interested in military aviation and is a keen motor cyclist, owning both a Triumph Tiger 955i and a Motor Guzzi California.

Grahame says ‘Working for Arriva not only gives me job satisfaction, but gives me the opportunity to meet all sorts of people, see lots of different places, and to work with a really good bunch’.

Published: Thu 1 May 2008Modified: Wed 28 Apr 2010

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