Bus Shite

[Felly Magic]

Naked Plasma. This was how they arrived in the UK to be fitted out at Plaxton Scarborough, once you iron out all the annoying faults, they turn out to be very nimble and fast as foook, still a pile of shite though

 

 

 

[Yoss]

My bus moved to a new home yesterday. Our old yard is being sold for redevelopment but the Southampton and District Transport Heritage Trust (catchy name) have done a deal to use part of the Bursledon Brickworks site.

 

This was the site when I arrived yesterday.

The Swift had conveniently broken down where it was parked blocking most of the other buses in but I managed to squeeze mine in on the end. The site isn't finished and more land is slowly being levelled in this little woodland clearing. The hope is to have seven buses either side and maybe one or two runners in the middle that can be easily moved. The trees are a double edged sword. They provide shelter in the summer keeping the sun off but hold moisture when it's cold and wet which tends to turn buses green though the Trust have an agreement that we can use nearby Lucketts Travels bus wash.

 

Our old site was similar meaning I had to wash all the moss and algae off every Spring except I used to have to do it by hand, standing on an old shipping container to get to the top deck. That was an all day job.

 

 

BUT! We have our own railway station!

Which is actually an old flatbed wagon planted next to a narrow gauge line that runs round the site.

 

This is the view of the line from the platform.

 

And if you look the other way...

A proper integrated transport hub, though I don't know when the next train is.

 

The Brickworks itself is one of these industrial heritage type places with all sorts of old machines lying around.

Some parts are still derelict.

 

And there's a shed down the bottom full of traction engines.

 

Some random machines.

 

And there's bits of old buildings just dotted about the place.

 

And bricks of course.

[Felly Magic]

A friend of mine has just aquired a second, yes second Optare Citpacer VW LT55, sadly it's failed the MOT on poorly aligned brakes. It's an uber rare coach spec version, with upside down Mk3 Grandad rear lights, will get some photos off em soon, here's a taster

 

[jbz2079]

I've seen one on the road, it belonged to Blackpool Transport and it was new.

They had a few, they didn't persist with them for long though.

[tooSavvy]

 

Fred Dibnah arrived and announced "Heh, brought too many laddas! eh"

 

TS

[quicksilver]

A friend of mine has just aquired a second, yes second Optare Citpacer VW LT55, sadly it's failed the MOT on poorly aligned brakes. It's an uber rare coach spec version, with upside down Mk3 Grandad rear lights, will get some photos off em soon, here's a taster

 

Magic Rider Optare CityPacer D901MWR.JPG

There's a coincidence, I'm currently working on a model of one of these, which were known as the InterCityPacer. That one survives thanks to one of my local operators, who bought it from a scrapyard as a parts donor for their fleet of CityPacer buses but decided it was good enough to rebuild and put into use. I think it went on to a couple more operators afterwards before being preserved.

 

Here it is back in 1999, complete with Granada lights and a bonus beige Richard Bucket-mobile.

[Yoss]

Just spotted this at Lordshill Sainsbury's, in Southampton.

 

Last week I saw a Brighton and Hove bus on the 18 in Shirley but was unable to get a picture. It did make me do a double take though. I know they are all part of Go Ahead but it's like the early days of Blue Line when the first batch of buses were painted but as they expanded they were getting old VRs from anywhere and putting them straight in service. They're certainly brightening the place up.

[lisbon_road]

Yoss, I am a member of SDTHT (or lapsed, not sure).  Looks like the new site is good.

 

Are First giving up more services in Southampton then?  I know they've dropped some schools and also the park and ride service in Chandlers Ford, so presumably the 'heritage' fleet of the step Darts and the Olympian might be gone now.  

[Yoss]

I know they chopped the route 12 completely a few weeks ago. This linked the hospital to Shirley via Millbrook and was effectively the old Routemaster route 17A. If you want to go from Millbrook to the hospital now you have to take two buses via Shirley. And yet they increase the frequency of the main routes into town leaving Shirley High street gridlocked half the time.

 

I hardly use them any more.

[tooSavvy]

Flickr..

 

Select pic > bottom right is a bent arrow logo > tap = blue box with script to host >> you just want the bit between [i.mg] XXX [/i.mg] inclusive.

 

*no DOT in IMG... Just to show you

 

 

TS

[jon.k]

83c Thanks for those great pictures - If I won the lottery I'd love to save those plaxtons or duple. Just the kind of thing that used to be at the shonkier end of the transport when I was in school. Used to go on on of those Berkhofs too, although I always thought it was a jonkheere.

[jon.k]

Ready to go as in driving, or ready for restoration? I can’t believe those costs!

[Inspector Morose]

When I had my Fleetline rest project, I'd sunk just shy of £7000 into it and it was only halfway done before I became broke. It was also part owned and the other guy had put about the same amount into it as well.

Basically bus restoration is exactly the same as car restoration just much, much bigger, including the bills!

Happily the Fleetline is now done (look up NOV880G) and it attends the occasional rally alongside some of the other vehicles I saved from the scrap man. I may not have any buses anymore but I'm content in the knowledge that I played my part at the time.

[tooSavvy]

"..vehicles I saved from the scrap man. I may not have any buses anymore but I'm content in the knowledge that I played my part at the time.."

 

Station did the same with my car (saving it from the Oval)

 

Good on you m8

 

 

TS

[Felly Magic]

I dread to think how much my mate Keith has sunk in to his buses over the years, especially as one he rescued twice!

[dollywobbler]

To be fair, £50,000-60,000 is a small sum when it comes to the restoration of some cars, so I reckon buses are still good value. I guess the main difference is that buses aren't owned by the same sort of people who don't mind paying £100,000 to restore a Jaguar sports car...

[Inspector Morose]

And up until recently buses weren't worth a lot, even restored. At the time I had mine, you could buy a working halfcab for £2000 or possibly less. We paid £750 for the Fleetline - the last bus bought by Birmingham Corporation, the VR (NOB413M) cost me £1200 and the midland red short Ford (YHA359J) was a grand.

[Felly Magic]

Not enough power to do either, sidestepped the clutch on a B10M, it didn't like it

[Felly Magic]

Me and a mate cleared out the stores of Yorkshire Terrier * Barnsley & District when they withdrew the last Nationals, and gutted their scrappers, I can't see that many modern buses being preserved, due to the complexity and abundance of fragile ECUs, a B10B has passed out of preservation, back to an operator I noticed, not helped that a lot of veg buy buses, then don't have a clue what to do. I did think about preserving a Scania L113 at one point, but seeing how they rotted underneath, bloody glad I didn't, esp as the engines do suffer from OMGHGF too, and EGAS plays up a lot

[Guest Hooli]

^^^^^ EXCELLENT!

 

I got a Dart about 2/3rds of that far around out of a bus wash on wet concrete. Lucky it stopped when it did as it was swinging for a row of cars parked in the garage during the day...

 

Oh & whatever deckers we had at Stagecoach in Worthing would step out if you came down the side of Lancing boating lake & turned right quick enough in the wet... Used up the whole dual cabbage way

[Vin]

   june 1978 by foundin_a_attic, on Flickr

[sierraman]

In Bristol a week or so ago I saw a Volvo Ailsa on a student route. Didnt think any were still in service?

[busmansholiday]

I remember deliberately putting a Chesterfield AEC Reliance Neepsend sideways around a corner in Derbyshire one very snowie night. Only passenger was a mate who'd come for a ride on it. He went the same colour as the snow.

 

Most bus companies painted at least one bus silver back in 1977 for the Queens Jubilee. London actually renumbered some RM's into a special series, SRM. Seem to remember that SYPTE put some bloody big royal crests on the front of a DMS style Fleetline as well.

[wuvvum]

Here is a video of a bus drifting in Edinburgh recently.

 

https://youtu.be/_Z-k_wEg8ow

[bramz7]

 

I saw this Saracakis bodied B10M in Thessaloniki back in May last year. They're all at least 20 years old now, sadly I did not get a chance to have a ride on one. 

 

 

[Zelandeth]

Only time I've encountered the back end stepping out on a bus (the greasy muddy slippy concrete farmyard at John's place doesn't count!) was when Bluebird had just got the batch of 51 plate Man/ALX300 buses in Aberdeen.

 

Not sure what the deal with those things was - best theory we had was that the gearbox was in the wrong mode. Those things would *shift* if you put your foot down - dropping straight through several years and pegging the rev counter in each gear. Turning out of a junction on a damp road it was easily possible to get the wheels to spin up when the box slammed into second.

 

Reckon the firmware was updated after a month or two as it seemed to calm down after that.

 

Most ridiculous performance moment I've come across in a bus? Ex-demonstrator Optare Spectra. Had cruise fitted - because demonstrator - and if you hit "resume" the thing would immediately calculate the fastest possible way to get back to the preset speed. Normal throttle and gearbox mapping went utterly out the window. Scared the living daylights out of me the first time.

 

Now, the farm John has, there have been many crazy things happening there over the years, especially with some of the rotten hulks that were beyond redemption. Questions which needed answering...such as "can you handbrake turn a coach?" (sort of - though all I saw was ceiling as I ended up standing on my head in the door well as the bugger didn't tell me what he was up to) and "how hard is it really to tip over a double decker?" We're among the madness. The answer to the latter question was "a heck of a lot harder than you would really think." The angles it got to before dropping back level again were utterly baffling.

 

Should point out that these horrible abuses were all done on vehicles that were really beyond hope, and from which all valuable bits had already been harvested other than a few mechanical bits needed to actually make them go.

 

Really do need to get to some of the proper shows this year. Though if I wind up coming across a Bedford based Duple Dominant II, especially if actually moving, I'll most likely wind up getting horribly emotional, which nobody wants to see! I'm not ever actually going to hope to get behind the wheel again until I wind up (inevitably) buying one.

 

STA380R, I blame you. It's that vehicle's fault that I wound up with this interest in the field as a whole. If I had a lottery win (and of course if it hadn't long since been turned to tin cans as I believe it has), I'd buy it tomorrow and restore it and hang the cost.

[Yoss]

Some weeks ago after posting some pictures of RMA 10 at least one of you wanted to see more. Coupled with egg posting stuff about songs about Herne Bay prompted me to dig this lot out. I'd go and put the kettle on if I was you, this could take a while.

 

As mentioned previously my friend Colin had a small fleet of RM's for private hire work and would take on almost anything. I seem to remember this job came from someone he knew at Camberwell or Peckham who also had a preserved RM. He was approached by someone else at the garage who was involved with this band and they wanted a bus for a trip to Herne Bay. This guy didn't fancy the job but Colin was happy to do it.

 

 

The job started at midday in Trafalgar Square. I was still a postie then but in those days we finished about 9am on a Saturday, this was 1994, so I was able to drive to Hounslow East (no parking restrictions in the roads around the station then) and jump on the Piccadilly Line and arrive in good time. To be honest I don't think you even needed a conductor on an RMA but Colin always liked to have someone on the back to keep an eye on things and this sounded like a great job that I would have happily done for free.

 

So the basic premise was take a load of this bands fans to Herne Bay for a gig, and take them home again. Simple.

 

Here's the bus arriving at Trafalgar Square. Coln kept his buses in a corner of Mullany's Coaches yard in Watford and I would normally meet him there but as I was working I said I'd go straight here. This was before any mobile communications, you just agreed to be in a certain place at a certain time and it always seemed to work.

As you can see, it was a lovely day for a trip to the seaside.

Notice the blinds. Pinhead Nation the band, Where's Herne Bay, the name of their new single, hence them wanting to do a gig there to promote it and fshh5 the catalogue number of said single. Colin liked the little details like this.

 

Actually I'll let the band tell you about in their own words.

 

And they also supplied us with a map.

These look like some ancient treasure map, not because they're almost 25 years but because I picked them up off the floor of the bus at the end of the trip. They've looked like this since day one but I've preserved them as such since then.

 

The first stop was Blackheath Common to meet the band in their van.

The van turned out to be a Bedford CF ex ambulance in blue and white which for some reason I completely failed to get a picture of. I regret this deeply and have no idea why I didn't. So off we set down the A2 with an ex ambulance and slightly faded RMA like a mini hippie convoy.

 

The original plan was for a picnic on the beach but the weather put paid to that. They'd bought their own comprehensive picnic which took up both downstairs bench seats on the bus. Anyway a couple of them went off for a recce and came back soon after having found a pub that was has happy to have us and our picnic and the rest of the afternoon was spent here. I don't remember now the name of the pub which is a shame because egg could tell us if it was still there. Again, if it was now I would have taken many more photos but at the time I only seemed to do public transport.

 

Eventually we retired to the Herne Bay Snooker Club (the pub was very close to this if that helps) for the gig. The support act were Zunomen who never troubled the charts but did once pop up on Mark and Lard's old night time Radio 1 show.

 

Then the main act, Pinhead Nation. This is where the reality started to deviate from the plan. The girlfriend of one of the band was enjoying herself so much she fell over and hit her head on one of the moniters (the stage was only about four inches higher then the main floor). There was some blood and she was rushed off to hospital in Canterbury in the band's Bedford which was kind've neat as it reverted to being an actual ambulance for the first time in fifteen years. I wasn't the only person thinking this was a good thing. It turned out she was OK but they were keeping her in overnight so she wasn't coming back and niether was the ambulance/band van.

 

The original plan was to get the fans (I think they were just friends of the band, there were about 35 of them) back on the bus as soon as the gig finished and get them back to London but now the band had no transport. They asked if we could help and we were happy to do so, so all the gear was loaded into the lower saloon and most of the passengers fitted upstairs.

 

Outside the club waiting to load up.

 

It was now past midnight before we left and even with 55mph cruising thanks to the high speed diff we were into the early hours before we got back to London. A few people started asking which way we were going back. Now, obviously London has an excellent night bus network based on Trafalgar Square so it would have been easy to drop them all back there but I think Colin was enjoying himself so we asked where people were going and a tour of south London was devised. We're talking 2-3am now so it was very quiet. This is definitely the best time to be driving in London.

 

We were then left with the band and all their gear so off to Wapping we went to unload. And there ends my career as a roadie.

 

This is outside the studio of Dogfish Records.

You can see in the top right corner that it is just starting to get light.

 

It was now breakfast time and Colin knew somewhere off Oxford Street that would be open at this time. Again I can't remember where but it was a kiosk, I think meant for taxi drivers, hence it being open at this time.

 

We just parked up in the middle of Oxford Street.

It's not often you see it this empty.

 

Whilst standing with camera in hand waiting to take the above picture a taxi came past and these two girls suddenly appeared out of the window.

They obviously wanted their pictures taken so I obliged. It's a bit fuzzy but I had to act quickly. Note the look of worry/confusion on the taxi driver's face. If we had a thread for cars and girls this would be a great entry.

 

They'd obviously had a good night out too but I'll bet not nearly as good as ours.

 

 

I also have this souvenir of the day.

I'd review it but don't really know where to start. It's mainly instrumental and of the words there are the only ones I can make out are "Where's Herne Bay?". To sum it up in three words - a bit shouty. Oddly I googled them expecting them to have faded away before the internet started but no - they're still going! Lots of stuff on YouTube. Good for them!

[egg]

Top post Yoss, and here is the song

 

[egg]

The bus is parked in market Street, which looks like this today.

 

[Yoss]

Thanks egg. There seems to be an extra floor on the club and nice new windows. I'm guessing it's all flats now?