The Brihanmumbai Electricity Supply and Transport (BEST) undertaking is organising a grand exhibition of its antique and operation-development systems at its Museum. The exhibition will be held from Saturday 5 August to Monday 7 August 2023 at the BEST Undertaking’s Museum located on the third floor of the administrative block at the Anik Depot.
Entry will be free to all and special buses will be pressed into service from Rani Lakshmi Chowk (Sion) Bus Station and Kurla (East) Bus Station to Anik Depot.
The exhibition will be held to commerate the 76th anniversary of the merger of BEST under the Birhanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC/MCGM) with the Bandra Bus Company, then under the Bandra Municipal Committee in 1949.
BEST’s notice on the Grand Exhibition
Special thanks to Shubham Padave for sharing this. That’s all from me for this time. Do take some time out over the weekend and checkout a part of Mumbai’s heritage.
Featured Image: BEST Museum’s entrance board (Ketaki Rangnekar/Google Maps)
In what can only be described as good news for both transit fans and history buffs alike, the Maharashtra Government has agreed to save one Bharat Stage 3 (BS3) Double Decker bus of the Brihanmumbai Electricity Supply and Transport (BEST) undertaking at the Anik Depot instead of scrapping it. This decision came from no less than the Chief Minister’s office. Apart from this, Dr Shrikant Shinde, Member of Parliament from Kalyan and son of CM Eknath Shinde has also promised to take up the matter.
As reported by Rajendra Aklekar for Mid-Day, this happened purely due to the initiative of three bus fans, particularly Shubham Padave, an IT professional from Mumbai with whom I have had the pleasure of interacting over Twitter in the past. Padave wrote to the BEST administration requesting them to preserve one bus. Since he did not get a satisfactory response, he took things a notch higher and directly wrote to the CM’s office and got a positive response.
The second bus fan is none other than Rupak Dhakate, whose posts in the past have been featured on this blog. Rupak was the ace photographer who snapped the glorious click of the bus chowky at Maharana Pratap Chowk in Mazagaon, helped bust the fake news that Oshiwara Depot was shutting down, and also created the amazing BEST Quarantine Challenge during the first lockdown in 2020. In 2020, Rupak started an initiative to ensure that at least one bus of every model is preserved at BEST’s museum at Anik. He rightly says that the double-decker bus is not just a bus but an emotion, and I cannot agree more with him.
The third bus fan is our very own Gandharva Purohit, who has written some really insightful posts on BESTpedia in the past. Don’t forget to read them here, if you haven’t already. Gandharva has made a great argument in favour of preserving heritage buses at BEST’s Museum at Anik on the lines of the London Transport Museum at Covent Garden, London. He also says that BEST can organise open-day events and sell souvenirs.
As of now, BEST has 12 of the new electric Switch double deckers and three open-top variants of the old fleet housed at the Colaba depot, and the remaining 19 of the classic double deckers are house at Marol and Dharavi. The Backbay, Kurla and Worli depots stopped housing double deckers when they were scrapped in 2020.
In 2021, Aklekar had reported on Mid-Day that the Manjusha Museum in Dharmasthala, Karnataka had paid ₹12 lakh for two double decker buses – ₹5 lakh for an open-top one and ₹7 lakh for a regular double decker – to be housed at the museum that houses over 8,000 artefacts.
Overall, this is a win for the transit heritage community. I personally feel that every city in India, especially the ones that got public transport right from the independence era should make a serious effort towards preserving older vehicles in museums to showcase the evolution of public transport to future generations.
That’s all from me this time.
Featured Image: Bus 4043 of the Dharavi Depot operating on Route C-42. Photo clicked by GP.Busfanning
Note to the mainstream media and Youtubers: The photograph featured above is copyright GP.Busfanning and has been used on BESTpedia with permission. Do not flick the image without permission from GP.Busfanning.
Alright, this is yet another post not related to public transport, but I have in the past written about first responders. In fact, one of the long-pending article ideas is on what Indian Police officer’s utility belt should be.
When we Indians hear police and fancy cars, we usually think of the Dubai Police which is equipped with a wide variety of exotic and even concept cars including but not limited to Aston Martin, Bentley, Lambhorgini, Lexus, and of course the Lykan HyperSport (as destroyed by Brian and Dom in Furious 7) and W Motors’ Ghiath as well.
However, much before Dubai, the Korps landelijke politiediensten (KLPD; or National Police Services Corps) which was the former national police force in the Netherlands made use of luxury vehicles.
The story starts thus, that in the 1960s, motorways in the Netherlands saw a lot of accidents, mainly due to the absence of marked speed limits on roads. In order to combat this, the Highway Patrol division of the KLPD set out defining the requirements for a high-speed patrol vehicle. They had to be fast of course, they had to have a rear-engine, be able to accelerate and brake at the drop of a hat, and one very unique requirement was that they had to have an open top.
Attention turned towards the town of Zuffenhausen in Germany where the headquarters and factory of Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG, known to most of us as just Porsche was located. The automobile manufacturer, who was winding up production on a well known model, the Porsche 356, ended up supplying the last ten cars of the model to the KLPD where they were the mainstay between 1962 and 1966.
In 1967, Porsche unveiled the Targa top variant of its flagship vehicle, the Porsche 911, and this caught the eye of the KLPD. The 911 was a hit with the law enforcement agency and remained a mainstay of its patrol units till 1996. A total of 507 Porsche vehicles, including the 356, 911, 914, 924 and 964 made their way into the agency’s motorpools, making it the largest historic Porsche police fleet in the world.
Each car was identifiable by it distinguished livery of orange and white with a single blue emergency light perched atop its A-pillar.
Now, very interestingly, all of these cars had open tops, hence the KLPD’s interest in the 911 only after the targa top was unveiled. The rationale for this? Officers were to be able to stand up in the car in order to direct traffic.
Another interesting thing to note was that the uniforms worn by officers driving these cars always included a distinctive orange helmet with safety goggles.
The livery has been since updated and now features blue and orange stripes and the uniform has a white and orange helmet.
Featured Image: A Porsche 911 being used by the KLPD (Oranje-Boom/Porsche Newsroom)
