Bendy buses made obsolete by Luton DART find new life as 'rest and recovery areas' for troops in Ukraine

Two articulated bendy-buses that once ferried thousands of holidaymakers from Luton Parkway railway station to the town’s airport have been driven to Ukraine as “rest and recovery areas” for front line troops.

The purple buses, still emblazoned with the words “Luton Airport-Luton Airport Parkway” in big white letters are now being fitted out with toilets and showers.

But they weren’t wafted there from Paradise – as in the famous Lorraine Chase Campari TV advert.

The buses were donated by the Go-Ahead Group after the opening of the airport’s DART monorail system made them redundant.

Then volunteers from the Wiltshire-based Swindon Humanitarian Aid Partnership drove them across Europe to Ukraine.

A spokesman for Go-Ahead said: “Rather than scrap the buses when the DART system opened, we decided to put them to good use. The two buses reached the Polish-Ukraine border on Friday.

“One of them might become a mobile exhibition showing the devastation brought about by the Russian onslaught.”