It was a heavy labour of love.
Conn Murphy simply adored the towering red double decker London buses.
"He was fascinated with them,'' Shirley Murphy says of her late husband, who died in 1985.
When the couple made their first of several visits to England decades ago, the pair rode every double decker they came across.
Forty-five years ago, they brought one home. It was the first double decker to ever roll through the streets of Prince Edward Island.
"Local people loved them,'' said Murphy.
And a unique business was born. Tourists hopped aboard for city tours of Charlottetown. Other passengers tossed in a quarter for a ride to Brackley Beach.
A second bus was added a couple years later. One year, three double deckers were shipped to P.E.I. to join the growing Abegweit Sightseeing Tours business.
By 1983, the fleet hit 11 strong - a mix of RTs, RTLs, and Routemasters. Tours grew to include the North Shore, South Shore, Anne of Green Gables and Kindred Spirits Tour, the Beach Scene Bus Service, and, of course, the streets of Charlottetown.
Abegweit Sightseeing Tours was also the first to see potential in taking cruise ship passengers for a ride.
"When we used to go down to the cruise ships, there would be no one down there,'' said Murphy of what was for a time a mobile monopoly of sorts.
Today, a host of motoring competition, including the Harbour Hippo, roll portside to welcome the growing number of cruise ships that dock in Charlottetown and release hundreds of passengers for a good chunk of the day.
Murphy wouldn't say whether strong competition was a factor in her recent decision to grind the double deckers' days to a halt on P.E.I. She wouldn't give any reason, in fact, for the timing other than noting she has sold all of the 11 red buses to a British businessman because she is confident they will be well looked after.
Roger Wright, who owns the largest fleet of London double deckers in the world, purchased the vintage machines to put them in a museum and also to roll out for commercial use like weddings.
"They're going to their home,'' said Murphy, clearly choked up at the thought of saying cheerio to what had become one of the more enduring tourist attractions as well as a familiar mobile landmark to the locals.
"I think that really they added to the city,'' she said.
Murphy never could have envisioned that one double decker purchased 45 years ago could run into such a lengthy and fulfilling business endeavor.
She is always quick, though, to put the focus on her late husband, who clocked countless miles behind the wheel of the double deckers.
"Conn did the work - and he worked damn hard,'' she said.
"My husband just loved them and he would have had the garage filled with 100 more.''
Lionel Moss, an engineer who worked for London Transport for years, is intimately familiar with the double deckers that turned heads on P.E.I. for almost five decades.
A friend told him 32 years ago that some London buses on P.E.I. - a place he had never heard of at the time - were experiencing problems with the gear boxes. He came to the Island and rebuilt them.
Conn asked Moss if he could come back to take care of a few other jobs on the buses. Moss came back - once a year, every year - to keep the buses in fine form.
"So yeah we dragged the job out for 32 years,'' he said.
His talent - Moss has traveled the world as a "freelance engineer'' to "sort out problems'' on London double deckers - combined with the quality of the construction of the buses resulted in remarkable road life.
The first bus brought to P.E.I. carted passengers for more than 60 years, both in England and here in the province.
While none of the buses have odometers, some of the vehicles are believed to have tallied a couple million kilometers each.
John Lidstone, a British transport journalist covering the repatriation of the buses, marvels at the condition of the double deckers. He is particularly struck by the London RT class, which made up the majority of the Murphy fleet.
"They literally went all over the world when London Transport pensioned them off up until 1979,'' he said of the RT, which was once the largest standardized fleet of buses anywhere in the world.
"And these are the very, very last ones working on a regular basis anywhere in the world. So that is Charlottetown's claim to fame.''
He lauds the Murphys for maintaining the integrity of the vehicles, noting many double deckers have gone overseas for tourist services like Abegweit Sightseeing Tours but those buses were usually modernized, their original British mechanics torn apart and replaced by Canadian, American and other counterpart parts.
Not so these 11 beauties that have in all likelihood been photographed by tens of thousands of visitors over the years.
"These are, as it says on the side of the buses, the real McCoy,'' said Lidstone. "I mean they still got posters inside from 'London Sightseeing Tour for 65p'.''
Lidstone was moved by the enthusiastic reaction of motorists as the 11 buses were driven out of Charlottetown earlier this week in two separate convoys to Halifax to board a boat for a five-day trip to Liverpool to be followed by a 300 kilometre or so drive to Essex.
Motorists and passengers waved and honked horns. Some sped past the buses, pulled to the side of the road, and clicked their cameras.
"These vehicles are just so special so it was a story I could not miss,'' said Lidstone. "These are icons of London.''
He notes that Shirley and Conn Murphy were not in business to make a lot of money. They ran those buses, he says, because they loved those buses.
"If I could have come over here and taken over running the business I would have gladly done so because I think they (double deckers) belong here,'' said Lidstone.
"They're an icon of Charlottetown and I think it is going to be quite a different place without them. It is going to be kind of sad to not see them here any more.''
