London Transport kept fairly detailed records of most of its activities and, fortunately for us, a lot of the documents have survived. There are four main groups of documents relating to service vehicles (plus photos), as follows:

Variation Sheets: These were issued most working days and listed all changes to the road vehicle fleet. Naturally the bulk of the content was buses, though service vehicles were well covered, especially in terms of additions and disposals. Coverage of SVs reduced in the early 1980s (leased vehicles were never included) and finished in 1986. Almost 20,000 variation sheets covering most of the period from 1944 to about 1995 were scanned by John Marshall several years ago. Following the closure of his Picasaweb galleries, these documents can now be found in a new branch of LTSV at www.ltsv.com/lta.

Advice Books: These were hand-written ledgers containing all changes within the service vehicle fleet. The contents should tie-up with those on the variation sheets, but this was not always the case. Three books are in existence, covering the period July 1939 to February 1963 and these will be added here in due course.

Registers: These were periodically issued documents listing the then-current service vehicle fleet, usually with allocation details and broken down by operating department. Separate documents covered the private car fleet. Various registers covering the period 1939 to 1990 are available and will be added here.

Vehicle Record Cards: These are index cards (one per vehicle) giving full technical and operational details for each vehicle, including all allocations and disposal details. They were used from at least the mid 1920s until the mid 1960s. It is intended in the future to add record cards to the relevant records in the vehicle database on this website. I will also add documents containing collections of cards to make downloading simpler. These will be listed here.

Photo Albums: Many official photographs were taken of London Transport service vehicles, often when they were either brand new or had been modified. A collection of these photos from the 1930s to 1960s period was passed to LTSV in mid-2024 and a selection of photos will be added in the normal way. However, as there are many photos that are not really suitable for general use, it was decided to make the complete albums available to download. Each PDF contains all the photos in each album, and the images here include the mounts and any captioning.

Most of the documents below are held by the Omnibus Society in their archive at the LT Museum Depot in Acton. The pages were photographed and the information contained was used to update the vehicle database. I am now in the process of enhancing each image and grouping them into PDF collections to enable them to be downloaded. This is quite a labour intensive job so it may take a while. Any comments would be welcomed and can be e-mailed to tom@ltsv.com.