REGULAR PATRONS of the city’s BEST bus services were in for a surprise on the 61st anniversary of the trusted transport system on Thursday, as a two-storied bus, converted into a museum-on-wheels, ferried them to their respective destinations for free.

The primary aim of this effort, according to the chairman of BEST committee Pravin Velji Chheda, was to acquaint the frequent commuters with BEST’s long heritage. “Though we ride the bus everyday, few of us know of its origin and how it came to be so inextricable to the city’s fabric. It is hard to imagine the city in the absence of this service,” said Chheda.

The interiors of the museum bus, which took a long route to Malad from Colaba, sported a pictorial chronology of buses dating as far back as the Bombay Tramway Company’s horse-drawn trams from 1874 right up till the double-decker services that started in 1943 and as we know it today, accompanied by vignettes of information.

BEST bus museum-keeper Sanjay Chaulkar gave the commuters the low down on the electric trams of 1907, the 1928 sightseeing vehicles started solely for tourists, the roofless double-decker started in 1939, the 1962 trolley bus imported from Czechoslovakia and the first Omini bus started in 1926 between Colaba and Crawford market.

A ticket-issuing machine pre-dating Independence was a hit. The obsolete manual device was one of the two remaining machines of its type in the world, the other being on display at the London Transport Museum.

“The only way to bring these fascinating facts to the people was to make the bus ride interactive and fun. Thus, we devised the concept of bringing the museum-onwheels to your doorstep. The idea was to traverse the busiest BEST routes from Colaba to Malad and invite people on the bus and fill them in on the significance of the service they take for granted,” said Vikram Duggal, the marketing head of Fever 104 FM, joint collaborators of the initiative.

Chheda also announced plans to increase the number of the buses to 4,000 from the present 3,600 by March 2009.