I have been interested in bus services one way or another all my life. My first bus trips were when I went to a pre-school in East Roseville at age 3. I travelled there and back in Royle Brothers’ route 56 buses, which then primarily ran from Chatswood to either Babbage Road or Penshurst Street. My mother said I learned to read from the destination signs on those buses.
When I was 5, we moved to the western side of Roseville and I went to primary school on Jack Wagg’s Route 221, part of which then ran between Roseville and Lindfield. Since then, that route has altered numbers three times and has been run by at least nine different operators, showing how route numbers and operators of what were once small, suburban bus routes have changed over time.
My high school years were spent at North Sydney Boys and, while there, the North Sydney tram network was replaced by buses in 1958.
I travelled on a lot of private bus routes back in the 1960s, 70s and 80s to identify their routes, as private bus timetables before 1980 rarely had route maps or even listed the streets along which they ran. That led to drawing my own route maps, by tracing them from sheet maps of the Sydney metropolitan area. Government bus timetables, on the other hand, always included descriptions of the route, whether it was in words or by means of maps.
My working life began at the AMP Society, where I was employed for over two decades. In 1990, however, I had a sea change and entered the bus industry in the late Roger Graham’s consultancy. There I was able to put my bus route and timetable knowledge to use in setting up the original contract areas and assessing compliance with minimum service levels under the Passenger Transport Act, as originally enacted. I later moved to Busways’ head office, where I was involved with timetables, sections and fares, among other duties. After retiring from full-time work, I trained as a bus driver with Forest Coach Lines, where I did not last long, but soon after took up a semi-retirement job driving minibuses with Lower North Shore Community Transport (now Community Connect).
I now live in the Forest area of Sydney, where the bus local operator is CDC (ComortDelGro Corporation), whose routes include those to Chatswood via East Roseville, creating a link of sorts with my first trips by bus through East Roseville in the 1940s.
Collecting bus timetables has been a passion of mine since the 1960s and they have been the basis for much of the sydneybusroutes.com website. I have also had the pleasure of knowing quite a number of the compilers of those timetables. Using my timetables, I still travel frequently by bus around the Sydney metropolitan area and I help organise monthly outings for a group of public transport enthusiasts, often to obscure destinations and via routes “less travelled”.
In recent times I have contributed my bus route knowledge to a number of publications, including the now ceased journal Australian Bus.
Robert Henderson
Sydney
July 2026