Bus Shite

[sloth]

this is how you paint a bus:

 

this is the old hull bus station, services terminated on the right side of the pic, and the stalls were on the left. so you had to crooss infront of a stream of buses. in the back ground is a cream and blue eyms double door. behind that, the sadly demolished abc cinema. the only thing left in this pic is the pavement on the right. i rode the atlanties as a kid, and have fond memories of them and their smell. 

 

[Richard]

This was making its final journey down the A90 this afternoon, along with three other buses from the same company. I bet SEPA paid them a visit.

 

20141120_154020[1] by RichardB5, on Flickr

[cms206]

This was making its final journey down the A90 this afternoon, along with three other buses from the same company. I bet SEPA paid them a visit.

 

20141120_154020[1] by RichardB5, on Flickr

We've just put one of those on the road...

[tooSavvy]

330 Diesel, 4 speed crash box.

 

Ha! I lived in South Shields when I was younger (& thinner) and travelled up and down the coast on 'Economic' buses.... tickets had printed on the back [book tickets, like thin cardboard, the clippie nicked a chunk out of   ] ... travel Economic, for economic travel...

 

Aneehoo... busses were 'crash'... and a new driver was 'doing it with his elbow' and I actually uttered the infamous put-down "hey, does it play any other tunes?" I was about 9.

 

TS

[Inspector Morose]

Sonata in several movements by unaccompanied gearbox.

[Grundig]

 

[rml2345]

There's a crash 'box Guy Arab II with a Gardner 5LW at Lathalmond bus museum which sorts the men from the boys. More often than not it makes some enthusiastic amateur look a right prune when they've gone for a snappy change up or down and it's refused to cooperate.

[Inspector Morose]

Bristol 5 speeders are legendary for making the driver look a complete numpty. 5th on those is achieved by moving the lever 'through' 4th then across then up. So far so good if you're lucky. Coming down, if you miss the revs and can't get it into 4th then you're stuck in the second neutral between 4th and 5th until you come to a halt. If you're really unlucky you miss time the up change to 5th and all you can do is drift to a stop so you can get the lever back to 1st then start over again. They fitted those boxes to most things from L types,K types, lodekkas and the mid engined MW.

 

Not the oddest box I've driven. Piloted one of the two surviving BMMO C5 motorway coaches for a while and their five speeders gate can only be described as a vague W where no gear is where you think it might be and go in no particular order.

[cms206]

Our 1983 prototype Volvo Citybus off to the bin today...

 

[Felly Magic]

 

West Riding/National Travel East Castleford based motor, remember going on a trip to Bridlington with my grandparents on this. Pissed it down all day

[Felly Magic]

VOSA Magnet M Travel of Castleford really are hitting the skids these days. My mate Daz T left there as he could see that they were heading for a fall. Check out the unladen weight of this ex Nottingham East Leaks Tridump

 

 

And now the alarming handling of an Optareshite Roadsweeper SR, it was doing less than 10 mph in this photo. Ross Travel still have a 55 plate Vario Beaver2 in use, but not for much longer, and surprisingly they now have a Dart/E200 in the fleet

 

 

And Arriva Yorks were one of the first in Arriva to get the lowheight Volvo B5LH milkfloats, one of which a while back ended up parked in someone's garden near my mum's house.

[Inspector Morose]

Our 1983 prototype Volvo Citybus off to the bin today...

Hang on, hang on. Didn't that have bonded windows?

[cms206]

Hang on, hang on. Didn't that have bonded windows?

It did. Apparantly it leaked even worse than normal East Lancs bodies and was rebuilt at huge expense by Dochertys. It still leaked like a sieve.

[Grundig]

 

[Noel Tidybeard]

 Arriva Yorks B5LHybrid YJ13FKD.JPG

we have those in birminghamshireton along with the enviro milkfloats

[Inspector Morose]

Manual box in the Volvo B5LH, you know.

 

About 45 years after the last deckers with them left Birmingham. Progress, they call it.

[Felly Magic]

They have ZF 12 speed badermatics

[cobblers]

VOSA Magnet M Travel of Castleford really are hitting the skids these days. My mate Daz T left there as he could see that they were heading for a fall. Check out the unladen weight of this ex Nottingham East Leaks Tridump

 

DOH.JPG

m Travel Trident V432DRA.JPG

 

 

Whats going on here? is that on purpose?

[rml2345]

They have ZF 12 speed badermatics

Volvo I-Shift shirley?... ZF equivalent is Arsetronic, as used in current Astromegas.

[Felly Magic]

Volvo classify I-shift as a badermatic now, and M Travel, well, they have had their 2nd warning and discs cut by the ministry again. Next time I don't think they will be so lucky. They have grown too big for the owner to cope with I think, and costs are being cut left, right & centre. It doesn't help that 

they had been running Renault/Irisbus Agora Lines, one of which is on ebay at the mo after it was chucked in against a Trident at Stafford Bus Centre

[cobblers]

Are they genuinely claiming that ELCB trident is the same unladen weight as a mondeo or is that just a cockup? if not, why would they do it? I'm not sure how these things work and it interests me.

[Inspector Morose]

Cock up. ULW 12000 kg

Buses are heavy buggers these days, they've gained at least 2000kg since the 80s for no real gain.

[cobblers]

Nah, there's about 250kg of damp fucked ribbon cable bodge wires and relays dangling off straggly bits of string on the back of all the PCBs that work the bells, blowers and lights in those East Lancs tridents if my experience of fixing them is. We've stopped doing service exchanges simply because there's no such thing as an original board left, If i repair one to as it was from the factory then the customer is always going to ring up and ask where the other ten wires go. My heart really does go out to any poor fucker that has to work on one of them things out in the field.

[Inspector Morose]

My heart really does go out to any poor fucker that has to work on one of them things out in the field.

Guess.

 

Fancy some Aladins to mend?!

[cobblers]

Ouch.

We have a wall of them at work, 8 foot long by 5 foot tall. Luckily the apprentices do most of them so I only get the awkward ones to fix, but we generally have a few hundred to go at so most of the time they just pick another easier one and try again. We've got a cracking test jig for them but it's got a wiper motor and about 25kg of load resistors and heatsinks in it, so it's a pain in the arse to shift onto my bench.

 

 

I'll guess one side of the indicators is shagged on half of them and the other ones just go totally haywire?

[Inspector Morose]

Mostly haywire! One of them randomly shuts down/starts various things at random including the engine.

 

We've three tridents now at work, one East Lancs and two presidents. All used as exhibition vehicles for various customers around the country. Many a happy hour/day spent hacking things around to get the desired result then driving them around the country and hoping it'll all hold together for the duration!

 

Our Metrobus is in the naughty corner with a broken back axle. Still managed to limp it home to Birmingham from Twickenham on its last day, growling and whining in great protest.

[Felly Magic]

East Leaks DAF's are even worse, one side of the saloon lights wont come on until the bus has been given some welly. A right pain in the arse when trying to do your walkround first thing on a morning

[cobblers]

I'd quite like to tinker on them in a warm garage, but trying to lash them up in the rain while the gaffer the place hung around cos they were a bus short of a run would be too much for me, it's bad enough when we have one of the local companies send the YTS lad down with something they need desperately and he hangs around in the corner awkwardly for three hours while I fix something.

 

As for aladins, if they go mental then they probably have the earlier software, it took them years to get it right. At the end of the part number there will be an F if it's OK, E are usually OK ish too. Anything earlier then it's liable to go mental, if it hasn't already then it will do quite soon.

People caught on to this and our competitor in the bus part fixing game just started rebadging them all as F, but we actually do put the latest software inside them which is pretty much spot on, as far as anything electronic on a bus can be. I mainly do IOUs/CAMU actia stuff. A lot of people moan about them but they are a lot better than anything before them and it's all generally repairable unless it's been underwater for weeks.

[cobblers]

East Leaks DAF's are even worse, one side of the saloon lights wont come on until the bus has been given some welly. A right pain in the arse when trying to do your walkround first thing on a morning

 

Battery monitor PCB is wet and knackered. it's plugged into the main BUS002 board which is supposedly behind the driver. unplug it and problems are solved. It's supposed to disable one side of the lights at 20v, and the other at 19v, but the adjustment pots always go to shit and the voltages drift. There's a button on the dash that you have to press to manually reset the 20v ones, but there's a mod they did  later on when they realised that if would trigger for mostly no reason. By now they have mostly been thrown into rivers in a rage.

[wuvvum]

 

And now the alarming handling of an Optareshite Roadsweeper SR, it was doing less than 10 mph in this photo. Ross Travel still have a 55 plate Vario Beaver2 in use, but not for much longer, and surprisingly they now have a Dart/E200 in the fleet

 

Ross Travel Solo SR YD63UZH.JPG

 

I was following an Optare Solo on the way into work this morning and was amused by the 2CV-esque body roll in corners (as well as the engine, which sounded almost exactly like my mum's old hairdryer, and appeared to have around half the power).  I would imagine those things are pretty much the same underneath?