A FORMER busman has performed a second rescue on a double-decker he drove out of Bournemouth’s burning bus station 40 years ago.

Trevor Shore was an 18-year-old conductor when he moved three buses away from the blaze that wrecked the town centre landmark in 1976.

Now he has spent £21,000 buying and restoring one of them, rather than see it leave Dorset.

Trevor, 58, admits he let his “heart rule his head” when he bought the Bristol FLF Lodekka. He keeps it in a barn at Verwood and hires it for events such as weddings through his company Dekkabus.

“She’s one of the last, certainly in Dorset, and I didn’t want her to go to somebody who would take her away from here or out of the country – plus I had a bit of history with her,” he said.

“It’s all right having these things but vehicles don’t like sitting around doing nothing. I thought, it’s costing me to keep her here, so she’s going to pay her way.”

The bus entered service in 1967 and was among the last batch of similar double-deckers bought by Hants & Dorset.

It was the last Hants & Dorset double-decker to be repainted from green to red, in 1975.

The following year, Trevor was off duty when fire broke out at Bournemouth’s bus and coach station in the early hours of a Sunday morning.

“Being 18, I was down the Square, clubbing and looking for girls. We just noticed the glow so we headed towards the bus station and somebody said the station was on fire,” said Trevor, of Mansfield Road, Parkstone.

The seat of the fire was in the underground coach station and Trevor remembers the surface of the bus station above was starting to move.

“Anybody that had a driving licence was getting the buses out of there,” he said.

The bus was almost written off two years later when it was involved in a collision with a lorry in Ferndown. But it was repaired and served for two more years before the Lodekkas – and their conductors – were withdrawn in November 1980.

The bus was bought by a pair of enthusiasts in 1981 and returned to the original green livery. It was put up for sale last year and Trevor had it restored to red by Middlesex company CarComm.

Trevor, who was born in Library Road and went to Henry Harbin School in Poole, also worked for Yellow Buses and was managing director of coach company Shoreline. He received the MBE for 28 years of road safety work.