Hundreds of vintage bus travellers queued in Warminster for a nostalgic trip to the ghost village of Imber.
Several London Transport Routemaster buses along with several vintage guest vehicles, many in the hand of private ownership, transported the travellers from outside Warminster Railway Station to Imber village.
By 9am the queue approached hundreds making it the largest group of people wanting to take part in the annual event.
They formed a line from the station, along Station Road.
There are only a few days each year on which the road through Imber is open and Imberbus is organised on one of those dates.
In 2009, a group of bus industry professionals achieved a long-standing ambition to run a vintage bus service from Warminster to the abandoned village of Imber on the Salisbury Plain.
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It proved to be so popular that it has now become an annual charity event, with most journeys continuing across the plain to parts of Wiltshire rarely seen by ordinary public transport users.
More than 40 buses, many of them the iconic red London buses, took part in the popular event dropping their passengers at the centre of the village close to Imber Church.
For the first time a group of Morris men preformed for the visitors on the road leading to the Village Church of St Giles, which was open for Imber bus day, raising funds toward the costs of the church.
This thirteenth-century church stands in rolling downland deep inside the military training area of Salisbury Plain.
It is all that remains of the ghost village of Imber (now just abandoned houses), which was evacuated for military training purposes
Imber is currently an uninhabited village in part of the British Army’s training grounds on the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, seven miles northeast of the town of Warminster.
The entire civilian population was evicted in 1943 to provide an exercise area for American troops preparing for the invasion of Europe during the Second World War.
After the war villagers were not allowed to return to their homes and the village remains under the control of the Ministry of Defence.
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