Far East Buses - Bangkok - Part Two BMTA Era From 1976

This second part of the Bangkok story takes the reader from the 1976 state instigated merger of 24 private and two state-owned bus operations up to the present day. In this part the buses operated by the Bangkok Mass Transit Authority are described type by type but the amount of detail available falls short of that included in other books in this series. Almost from the outset, BMTA was unable to provide the level of service envisaged when it was formed and the private sector was quickly contracted to run buses on BMTA's behalf under the Private Joint Service scheme. In the early days, the private buses, known as rot ruam locally, carried the same logo as BMTA used on its own buses - in fact many buses were transferred from BMTA to rot ruam operators. The rot ruam buses have been very much more difficult to document than those of BMTA and due to the large number of operators, some with but one route, they are covered largely in photographic album form.