Just once a year, a fleet of old London buses are allowed into military lands to take trips to an empty village where no one lives. It is of course, therefore hugely popular.
This is the bus route though the middle of the Salisbury Plain to the abandon village of Imber – the ImberBus.
There are only a few days each year on which the road to Imber is open to the public and so this year the Imberbus service will operate on:
Saturday 17th August 2019
You can look at it as a chance to ride on buses to an abandoned village, but that is almost to belittle the totality of the day out – riding through an empty landscape where trees have replaced tower blocks, where burnt out tanks are more common than Uber taxis, where a church in the middle of nowhere will serve you a cup of tea.
It’s a surreal experience.
There will be around 20 London Transport Routemaster buses (including a few new ones) providing a bus service from Warminster Station to Imber and onward to other isolated locations on the Salisbury Plain with some of the weirdest bus stop names you will ever see.
As the buses will be operating an ordinary bus service, there is no need for passengers to book in advance – just turn up and pay the conductor on the bus.
In addition — although you can easily take a normal train from Waterloo to Warminster (split the ticket at Salisbury as that’s often a lot cheaper), this year there will be a special service provided by UK Railtours in bright red London Transport livery.
Details for that are here.
However you choose to get there, if you fancy a fine day out in the countryside, to visit an abandoned village, and do so in a fleet of London buses, then put the 17th August in your diary.
I probably would of heard about Imber. Because I was born in Salisbury in Wiltshire but lived near Amesbury in a small village called Bulford. Which isn’t too far from Stonehenge. And my dad was in the army at the time so he would of heard about the small unpopulated inhabitant place in the Salisbury Plains.
uninhabited*