Destination blinds

Most blinds found on ebay are those from London Transport buses. There are a small number from the provinces but these don't seem to have the same appeal. London blinds are divided into three main types. The original ones which were manufactured by London Transport at their Chiswick, and later, Aldenham works. These were made from screen printed paper labels which were stuck onto a linen backing. The blinds were tough and generally fade proof. When production at LT stopped the work was outshipped to Norbury Brothers of Cheshire and McKenna Brothers, now the main producers of all bus blinds in the UK. The blinds lost the distinctive Johnson typeface; the new lettering was handcut but the blinds were still white on black. The other departure was that they were printed on tyvek. Tyvek was a waxy papery fibrous material that was very hard to tear but was prone to 'fold over' resulting in large expanses of backing showing on the edges of frequently turned blinds. Later on the now familiar day-glo yellow/green was adopted as the typeface colour. Blue was still used to indicate Express routes and the now computer designed blinds were now seen to display logos which were much more easy to produce using the PC rather than the cut paper blank. Only problem is that the blinds are made using a PC program that isn't WYSIWYG i.e. the designer doesn't see the actual blind on his monitor. Because of this the fonts are shrunk on wordy displays causing some unusual effects. A help to drivers was the inclusion on the reverse of an exact reproduction, albeit about 10cm wide, of the actual display. back in the days of LT blinds the blinds would have been stamped with a rubber stamp showing the destination or destination/route no but no intermediates. No one type of blind can be said to be the most collectable. Trolleybus blinds from the 1950s still fetch good money, as do long Routemaster NNs from central London garages. Metrobus side blinds are dull and rarely reach more than 5. RF/SMS/RP type blinds do well, especially Country area ones. I assume their popularity is driven by owners of preserved vehicles who need them to complete 'the look'. Tube stock blinds are also very popular, sometimes reaching 50. District Line ones are common, Metropolitan less so.