It was the only bus route of its kind in Belfast and after 30 years it will start running again at the end of this month, thanks to individual enterprise and a dollop of nostalgia. An old red double decker with the number 77 has been a mobile art work already and had a play written about it.
Going back to work is the cream. If it flourishes, the 77 bus could become that most useful symbol: a living sign of normality.
It was special because it went through north, west and south, crossed the Crumlin, the Shankill and the Falls and dipped into Sandy Row, while the other routes plodded out from the centre along major roads.
The 77 was a cross-town bus from the Waterworks on the Antrim Road to the Gasworks on the Ormeau, driver in his isolated cab, conductors pounding up and down the winding stairs. In pre-television days in film-mad Belfast it passed 12 cinemas, jinking across what we have learned to call sectarian interfaces.
"A Cook's Tour of trouble spots," a passenger, now middle-aged, says ruefully. "It couldn't survive 1969."
As neighbour fought neighbour and Belfast burned again, hijacked buses blocking roads almost daily, a bewildered British army had the service cancelled.
After that, to get to the Falls or the Shankill from the Antrim Road or the Ormeau you had to get a bus into the centre and another out. Even amid death and destruction, admirers mourned the lost route.
"It had different rhythms in the day," the rueful one remembers from the early 60s. "Workers going to the mills, nurses heading for the Mater or the Royal, students to Queen's. Doggie men heading one evening for the races in Dunmore Park and another night the other direction to Celtic Park."
A successful businessman now, from a modest background, the bus took him to university "and I got the last one home at 11.20. I could go to debates and still be in the door at 11.40." Brendan Murphy is one of Belfast's best-known photographers, originally a barman and publican. He used the 77 to get to work off the Falls.
"At about 9.30 it'd be mostly barmen, mainly country boys staying in digs on the Antrim Road, heading for the Falls or getting off in Shaftesbury Square for pubs on the Lisburn Road or the Ormeau. There'd be slagging back and forth: 'Were you at Maxim's last night? Was it good?' That meant did you get a woman. And there were important people on the bus: Denis Tuohy, a young fella with nice black hair then in the BBC; we were in awe of him because he was on the TV. And Bernard McLaverty the writer, only then he was headed for Queen's anatomy department to dissect rats." The best-known character on the bus, though, Brendan maintains, was his dog Scobie, a big white cross between Labrador and poodle, who often got tired of the bar, jumped on a 77 as it stopped at the pub door, padded upstairs to lie under the back seat and went home by himself.
The enterprising former bus driver who plans to revive the 77 remembers as a child watching conductors and drivers waiting at a stop near his home in Albert Street, "sharpening the penknives for their plugs of tobacco on a sandstone windowsill - there was a hole in the sill". Joe Lavelle tapped into a thriving market by running tours round Belfast on old double deckers.
Then he pestered the authorities into giving him the first licence to challenge Translink's Belfast monopoly. A Dublin bus company is supplying bus stops.
This 77 will not be that 77. Joe has two old buses but safety laws mean he must run modern vehicles much of the time. And parts of the old route are long departed, like the city life that used it. You can't go to the dogs in Belfast any more.
The mills are gone or made over for a bevy of modern purposes, from apartments and enterprise units to Sinn Féin press conferences. Cliftonpark Avenue, where once you could sit on the top deck and admire the upper storeys of faded mansions, one with a balcony, has long been a wasteland.
Where the bus swung along Albert Street into Durham Street the Westlink now slices through the city.
The new 77 will run every half hour from Monday to Friday from 7am to 6pm - no late-night service because halfway across the route in Northumberland Street, the security gates still swing closed at "tea time". But the 21st century's cross-town bus will service three hospitals - the Mater, the Royal Victoria and the City.
There might just be a whole new rhythm of Filipina, African and eastern European health workers to intrigue the ghosts of doggie men.