Category:London Crusader bus tour

English: The London Crusader was a double-decker bus sightseeing tour that ran in central London in the 1983/4/5 seasons. Departing hourly from Trafalgar Square, it used both open and closed top buses painted in a white livery with large diagonal green stripes, with the London Crusader name applied in horizontal rows within the stripe.

The buses were owned by London Country Bus Services and based out of their Leatherhead garage overnight, but the 'London Crusader' brand appears to have come from a coach hire & brokerage company set up in March 1983 by the National Bus Company as a division of National Express, in which LCBS may have been a founder or later partner (some National Travel London coaches also wore a variant of the diagonal stripe Crusader livery).

The buses used were 1972 built examples of the LCBS AN-class of Leyland Atlantean (PDR1A). At least four wore the livery, Park Royal bodied examples AN5 (reg. JPL 105K), AN10 (JPL 110K) & AN11 (JPL 111K), later joined by Metro-Cammel bodied AN109 (MPJ 209L). AN11 & AN109 were closed top buses, while AN5 was an open top. AN10 intially operated as a closed top, but was converted to open top in time for the 1984 season.

The tour only lasted until 1985, although the open toppers AN5 & AN10 were then repainted by LCBS along with two other Metro-Cammel open toppers (AN106 & AN110) into an NBC Green Line livery for use as the Green Line Round London Sightseeing Tour, also departing from Trafalgar Square. This tour only lasted for the 1986 season, with the vehicles then going their separate ways as LCBS was broken up into four to be privatised.