For the Holidays, a Nostalgia Trip on a Bus Like Ralph Kramden\'s

Everett Collection For the holidays, the transit system is rolling out vintage crosstown buses in Manhattan, including one like Ralph Kramden's - right down to the No. 2969 on the side.

“I'm in a time machine right now,” John Davies said from his seat beside a window that, like the people on the bus in the nursery-school lyric, went up and down. A “drop-style window,” to those in the know.

And what a time machine it was: A bus like the one Jackie Gleason was pictured in when television was new, “The Honeymooners” was a top-rated show, Gleason played a loudmouthed bus driver named Ralph Kramden and the fare was 15 cents. Unless it was 13 cents, the amount on the sign on the bus when Gleason posed for pictures.

The bus is one of several vintage buses that have come out of retirement as part of a holiday promotion by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. They have been assigned to the 42nd Street crosstown line in Manhattan on weekdays until Dec. 28. (Rain and snow keep them from their appointed rounds. “We don't send our babies out in bad weather,” said Charles Seaton, a spokesman for the transit agency.)

The bus, No. 2969, does not have air-conditioning. It does not have a passenger-operated exit door - the driver opens and closes it by pushing a silver handle to his left that also controls the front door. It does not have a windshield with a panoramic view. It does not have flashing lights on the front, the way “select bus service” buses do. It does not wear the blue-and-white uniform of modern New York buses. Its colors are green and silver, just as they always were.

For some passengers who are serious about buses - passengers who consider the real star of the 1994 runaway-bus movie “Speed” to have been not Sandra Bullock nor Keanu Reeves, but the bus - riding No. 2969 was a treat worth waiting at the bus stop for. They brought cameras to snap photographs of the old bus, one of 400 that joined the fleet in 1948 and carried passengers in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island but not the Bronx, according to the transit agency. For some of its life, it carried schoolchildren.

No. 2969 is older than the bus in “Speed.” Mr. Davies, 25, an art director at an advertising agency, said the look inside No. 2969 was “industrial, but it's cozy.”

“You can really sense these buses were sculpted, made by someone,” he said. “The current buses look generic, make me think ‘airport.'”

< p>And he liked the soft green seats in No. 2969. “They're more comfortable than seats in current buses,” he said.

It was long for its day, inside and out. No. 2969 and its garage-mates were longer than earlier buses - 40 feet long, even though they were built on the same chassis as their 35-foot-long predecessors.

Otto Yamamaoto, 53, said he remembered riding similar buses in San Diego in the 1970s, when he was in junior high school. “The new ones are a lot bigger and not quite so noisy,” he said. “But the buses like this have a little more character.”

One woman on her way to the Upper West Side - “I won't give my name; I have a record,” she declared - said the old buses were an improvement. She complained about poor service on 42nd Street, especially since the transit agency shortened the M104 route. It once ran along 42nd Street to First Avenue, but now goes only as far east as Seventh Avenue.

The result, she said, was that buses on 42nd Street seem few and far between. “You can stand and wait 20, 25 minutes” before one comes, she said. When the old buses are running, she said, the waiting times are shorter.

In the driver's seat was Gary Kull, who is 56 and has spent 26 years as a bus driver. “No power steering,” he said. “It brings back the old days, when I started. We didn't have power steering.”

The buses in the fleet when he was a novice were newer than the long-retired vehicles like No. 2969 that are back on the street for the holiday promotion. But there is some revisionist history about the No. 2969 that he was driving. It began life as No. 4789. Later it went through an identity change and was given the number of the bus that Gleason was pictured in, with Audrey Meadows, Art Carney and Joyce Randolph hanging out the windows.

The original No. 2969 did not last until “The Honeymooners” was delighting a new generation. Mr. Seaton, the transit authority spokesman, said the original No. 2969 “would have been a New York City Omnibus (private operator) vehicle” and “may or may not have been absorbed” by the transit authority in the 1962 takeover of Fifth Avenue Coach Lines.

So what happened to the original No. 2969? It was “definitely scrapped,” he said.