Bus Shite

[Zelandeth]

Some motors are like that, no matter how much workshop time & money spent on them, they still are unreliable piles of crap, then you have motors that look absolute nails, and they never break down.

 

Yep.

 

STA380R was a complete, total and utter shed.  She would do about 50 downhill with a following wind, and had play in every drive and suspension component which you could probably measure in inches.  However she just kept chugging along without complaint and did everything that was asked of her.  Even the heater managed to keep up with Aberdeenshire winters.

 

The one mentioned above was identical mechanically I believe (different body though), and despite being a year newer and with far, far less miles on the clock was just a complete menace and left us standing at the side of the road on several occasions.  The final one being when it immobilised itself in the middle of some nasty S bends when the engine overheated catastrophically and seized up.  Apparently several components that had no right to be were glowing.  That was the last time we ever saw it.

[Felly Magic]

We did have a Strider Scania up north nicknamed 'the beast' because the frigger would go off the clock, it looked an absolute bag of wank, not a straight panel on it, but it just flew, it got written off in an RTA due to age, and not being low floor, was 61118, L640PWR, even had a notice in the cab saying 'Warning, The Beast, Experienced Drivers Only, Handle With Care', it was the regular staff bus too

[jon.k]

Is this one for the repanelled front thread?

[jon.k]

And just a really shite bus

[Zelandeth]

We did have a Strider Scania up north nicknamed 'the beast' because the frigger would go off the clock, it looked an absolute bag of wank, not a straight panel on it, but it just flew, it got written off in an RTA due to age, and not being low floor, was 61118, L640PWR, even had a notice in the cab saying 'Warning, The Beast, Experienced Drivers Only, Handle With Care', it was the regular staff bus too

 

The best equivalent to that I can recall was a G plated Alexander PS that Bluebird had for a while.  They had a heap of these, mostly Volvo B10M based - this one I assumed was the same until I heard it start one day.  Firstly the noise came from the wrong end, secondly it definitely wasn't a Volvo.  It was much more the slow, loping idle that I'd expect to hear from something like an old Atlantean.  Turned out to be Scania based, have to guess in the absence of any other data probably a K.113.

 

Next day on the way into town the sucker overtook me on the dual carriageway - as though I was standing still - and I was doing an indicated 75.  Granted, that was based on a Lada speedometer so I reckon you can probably knock at least 10mph off that.

 

Did get to ride it as a passenger once - and yes, it bloody flew.  Sounded epic as well.  Sadly it was only in the area for a month or so then vanished.  Apparently the main reason nobody really wanted it was that it drank diesel at a truly alarming rate!

 

...Given the rate it was generally seen travelling at, I'm not exactly surprised!

 

 

Also in the buses that could go off the clock, one springs to mind was a bus we got as a replacement on the NX590 heading north one evening.  Plaxton Paramount body, and must have been one of the very last with the old style Volvo dash.  The driver demonstrated to me an interesting quirk of that bus (which apparently was his usual steer), in that turning the ignition off switched off a grand total of two things.  One being the temperature gauge, the other being the speed limiter!  Given we were running a good couple of hours late at that point, a feature he was only too pleased to demonstrate!

 

 

As for Frankenstein's Monsters - I stumbled across a photo on the web a few years back of a coach which had a Duple Dominant II body, sans a good chunk of the brightwork, but with a Plaxton Supreme IV nose.  Took my brain a good few seconds to untangle what about the image didn't feel right and figure it out.

 

Surprised putting Duple and Plaxton bits on the same bus didn't make it spontaneously explode in disgust!

[bramz7]

Time to post these, again.

 

Dart Dash. by Sam Osbon, on Flickr

 

1996 Dennis Dart SLF/ Plaxton Pointer II Bus. by Sam Osbon, on Flickr

 

2000 Dennis Dart SPD 'Stagecoach In Hampshire'. by Sam Osbon, on Flickr

 

How long do you have left? by Sam Osbon, on Flickr

 

These were the buses I used to get when living in Odiham. The SPD Darts sounded like angry robots from inside, and topped out at like 45. Sounded throaty from the outside though.

 

The Dart Dashes were run into the ground.

 

That particular B10M was probably the last one on the go in Basingstoke. It was quick.

 

That ex HK Dart was slow as hell.

[Zelandeth]

Really sad that those PS bodied B10Ms were one bus I never got a shot behind the wheel of.  To me they were pretty much the last of the "real" vehicles of their type.  Not exactly luxurious, they rattled like nothing else on earth (okay anything with a Northern Counties badge on would be ten times worse), were hotter than hell in the summer and freezing in the winter, and having a conversation at anything north of 30mph was a lost cause.  Especially when the fan thermostat failed leaving the cooling fan stuck on full tilt full time.  Reckon that knocked about 10mph off the top speed of a couple of them.  However at least the P and R plated ones that Bluebird had seemed to be nigh on indestructible - even when bouncing off the rev limiter on the A96 all day every day.

 

H622ACK deserves a particular mention for being particularly ill suited to that duty on account of having an oddly low speed diff and a three speed ZF box (most of the later P and R plated ones were Voith)...this resulted in a top speed of 40, maybe 42 at a stretch downhill with a following wind - but she didn't half leap off the mark when you pulled away.

 

Also used to change gear with a sledgehammer it felt like - to the extent that the momentum of the cooing fan and used to result in the belt chirping in protest every time it dropped from first to second gear.

 

Was in bloody good nick for a H plate vehicle too (at least superficially, no idea what it was like underneath or what mechanical gremlins may have been hiding), and I always thought would be a good candidate for preservation.

[Guest Hooli]

Oh now they look like the shit I used to drive out of the Worthing depot. Those 2000 Darts went ok but had fuck all brakes when loaded.

The B10 thing I think I might remember the number as one we once had, they did go well & I seem to recall were quite good to drive.

[SiC]

Wessex buses (Rotala) here have been & are cutting back massively.

https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/wessex-bus-close-services-42-1806005

[Inspector Morose]

Now the rebuilding of buses didn't just happen at small coach operators, no, even council owned corporations used to do it too. And not just to motorbuses either. Walsall Corporation, led by the maverick R.Edgley-Cox in the post war years was a past master of acquiring or modifying vehicles to suit the needs of the corporation, especially if it could save a few bob in the process.

Whilst general manager at St Helens, he orchestrated the purchase of a fleet of AEC RT-a-likes for operation as a small batch of buses identical in specification to the ones being built in large orders for London Transport would be cheaper to purchase than to request the body builder (and Chassis manufacturer for that matter) to change styles, specification and what-not. This specification was identical to LT spec, down to the destination layout and plate on the engine cover for the fleet number.

This consideration of the public purse continued after he moved south to Walsall Corporation, especially when it came to his beloved trolleybus system. After 1962 there were no more new trolleybuses being built for the UK as operation wound down in fleets across the country. The stalwarts of electric traction, Walsall included, had therefore a problem of a supply of vehicles. As other systems were closed, second hand buses were bought from around the country for operation in Walsall. The problem was that these vehicles were to the, then obsolete 27ft length and lacked sufficient capacity on some routes (there was a increase in the legal length of double deck buses on 2 axles in 1955 - from 27ft to 30ft thanks to Walsall and Edgley-Cox). The answer was to rebuild and lengthen the 27ft long buses to 30ft long, therefore adding at least 8 more seats to the bus and increasing standee room. Before the first "foreign" bus was converted, one of the home fleet of 27ft Sunbeams was rebuilt in the workshops and came out months later looking like this:

 

 

Now, while it was being rebuilt, it lost its front axle (it was built to 7'6" wide) for use elsewhere so a new front axle was purchased, second hand, of course, from an 8' wide bus. The wheelarches were simply widened to cover the protruding tyres and it was pressed into service, lasting right to the end of trolleybus operation in 1970 and it now survives at the Sandtoft Trolleybus Museum in preservation.

 

The next rebuild was a little different as, not only did they lengthen the whole bus by 3 feet but they also moved the entrance and staircase forward to the position favored by Edgley-cox as it meant the driver could oversee the doors, leaving the conductor free to concentrate on fare collection and so miss less fares. An ex Cleethorpes vehicle was chosen which went from looking like this:

 

To looking like this:

 

 

 

I could go on for ever about the modifications, rebuilds, one offs, specials and prototypes at Walsall but I think I'll leave it there for the time being. As this little snippet shows, they were a place that liked to get the full worth out of their stuff!

 

[83C]

I’ve got an idea that H622 ACK is at Winkleigh, i’ll check next week.

[twosmoke300]

Love this thread guys , I have no real connection or interest in buses but find the history and engineering interesting. Keep up the good work

[Zelandeth]

I’ve got an idea that H622 ACK is at Winkleigh, i’ll check next week.

 

Would be a real surprise to see if she was still on the go.  Was most likely 2006 or earlier when I was last a passenger, before I moved into Aberdeen having got fed up of getting up at 5AM to leave for work and getting home about 8PM from work because of the commute.

[Felly Magic]

Wessex (Rotala) are in a serious situation, it is looking like the operation is on the brink, the ACK B10Ms had ZF 4HP500 4 speed lumps, with short town diffs, giving them stabbed rat acceleration, and it would have some serious hill climbing abilities, which did surprise me that Mainline picked Voith 3 speeds for South Yorkshire, I think it could be that the Voith unit had a better retarder

[Felly Magic]

I have actually seen full blown coach conversions on the mk1 Master, complete with a boot, and boy are they grim, was bad enough driving newer Masters

[Zelandeth]

I have actually seen full blown coach conversions on the mk1 Master, complete with a boot, and boy are they grim, was bad enough driving newer Masters

Didn't Neoplan make one of them? As I recall, crap it may have been...but it did look like it had landed from outer space.

[83C]

Would be a real surprise to see if she was still on the go. Was most likely 2006 or earlier when I was last a passenger, before I moved into Aberdeen having got fed up of getting up at 5AM to leave for work and getting home about 8PM from work because of the commute.

The more I think about it the more I’m certain it is. It’s still in the white and blue livery and the current owners have connections with the Scottish Bus Museum. It’s also subtly different to the later PSs, different drivers window and body panelling. I’m there next week, P830 FVU may well be there too (there’s at least a dozen mostly ex-Stagecoach PSs there).

[Felly Magic]

The ones I'm on about used the high top van shell with a false floor in, 2+1 seats, and the tailgate rear end hacked about so only the lower half hinged up, a local minicab firm in the village where I grew up had one, and a Reebur Bedford CF diesel

[Zelandeth]

The more I think about it the more I’m certain it is. It’s still in the white and blue livery and the current owners have connections with the Scottish Bus Museum. It’s also subtly different to the later PSs, different drivers window and body panelling. I’m there next week, P830 FVU may well be there too (there’s at least a dozen mostly ex-Stagecoach PSs there).

Been on that on the 307 a good few times too. That one was one which had never-ending issues with screeching fanbelts as I recall.

 

H622ACK was also notable by having what I assume was it's original (brown green and tan if I remember right - a diamond shaped design I think) seat moquette rather than the usual blue with stagecoach roundel design or the grey/brown chevron one on a lot of the 90s coaches.

 

Didn't have the side radiator either if I remember rightly either.

 

I really need to get off my bloody backside and get over to the Oxford Bus Museum, I really miss spending time around these old crates...Always find myself realising that when I start thinking back to both my early days at the council when I commuted by bus - and later when I got more involved in the road safety side of things and got to regularly to out and drive them.

 

Pretty certain this was a large reason for going and buying a bloody great camper van!

 

Speaking of 90s Stagecoach coaches...

 

Where the HELL did they find the seats they fitted to their Plaxton Premiere coaches (R***OPS and N***USS spring to mind) that we saw on the 10 and 305 (before the Jonkheere Mistral's thankfully took over)?!? They must be the most uncomfortable seats I have ever had to endure. They honestly must have been designed by someone who doesn't have a head! Being stuck on one of them for a couple of hours each way when I was at university was torture. To the extent that getting crammed into one of the Merc Breadvans was preferable!

[busmansholiday]

Didn't Neoplan make one of them? As I recall, crap it may have been...but it did look like it had landed from outer space.

Neoplasm made a FWD single decker that really looked like a bag of shite (and allegedly was). I seem to remember one of Barnsley's undertakers having one (they dabbled in private hire at times of slack business) which really summed it up.

[83C]

H622 ACK would be a Mk3 B10M, so front mounted rad. Mk4s (1992ish onwards) had the side mounted jobbie that was great at hoovering up shite from the roadside...

[Pillock]

Totally sidetracked by an undertaker doing coach tours on the side.

 

Mind you, a lot of those SAGA-style mystery tours aren't far off.

[cms206]

H622 ACK was for sale recently with two or three others - scrap was mooted for them but I don't know what actually happened.

 

We ran six K-DAO PS-types including two of the Carlisle flood victims ans we genuinely couldn't fault any of them.

 

Except maybe 724. It did about 48mph, the other five (714/5/8/9/32) all did 60 at the very least. We later ran an R-reg Mk4 (R974 XVM) which was okay when we managed to get it to stop overheating.

 

While I always liked PS-types, I did used to regularly drive Q-type Leyland Tigers with Volvo powerplants which I always found superior... I suspect that was personal preference to be honest as even now I much prefer driving a Tiger to the B10M.

 

Even manual Tigers... I shall await the outcry from that statement!

 

Sent from my SM-G930F using Tapatalk

[Guest Hooli]

This deserves to be here

 

https://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/passengers-desperate-to-know-backstory-of-bus-drivers-who-didnt-wave-to-each-other-20170814133989

[Zelandeth]

i think the Neoplan vehicle  was a bespoke  Integral  and a little larger than a van based  vehicle 

neoplan N907 uniliner

https://www.flickr.com/photos/scottishcoachman/6160075182

That's the one. My memory had it looking much more Renault-ish than it really does.

 

H622 ACK would be a Mk3 B10M, so front mounted rad. Mk4s (1992ish onwards) had the side mounted jobbie that was great at hoovering up shite from the roadside...

I'm not sure whether to be proud of remembering that detail or ashamed!

 

The side mounted radiators always seemed a daft idea to me, given their tendency to hoover up every loose scrap of everything at the road side (must have been a particular pain on rural routes in the autumn) and vast increase in apparent noise of passing vehicles for pedestrians.

 

I'm assuming it was either to make service access easier or helped make the whole "power unit" more compact. Any actual knowledge from those who have actually worked on these vehicles rather than just dreamt of actually owning one.

 

 

Volvo did make some good kit in the 80s and 90s didn't they? The B6 variant I've encountered both with a Pointer II and ALX-200 body - both of which were utter rubbish, being the obvious exception that proves the rule.

 

First had one that used to regularly pop up on the then 28 service - I must have been on it a half dozen times, it never actually made it to the end of any one of those journeys! They also always seemed to be so short on power that they couldn't get out of their own way.

 

They were easy to spot by the very flattened shaped exhaust, usually massive hiss of a boost leak as soon as moving off, and usually knocking their nuts off to the extent that it sounded like there was no oil in the engine. ...granted, that could well be because there wasn't.

[83C]

The B6s were very hit and miss. I used to drive a handful of them at Slavecoach Cheltenham, 4 with Alexander Dash bodies and one with a Pointer 1 body. All were step entrance, the Dash’s were ok (and certainly preferable to the step entrance Darts in the fleet) but the Pointer was a real tonka toy - it could be thrown around and driven like the drivers arse was on fire all day and never seemed to go wrong apart from the night that I found the fuel gauge was accurate, much to the on-call fitters embarrassment - he’d told me half an hour previously to stop wasting his time when I told him the gauge was reading empty.

 

On the flip side I moved a trio of B6BLE low floors recently (and potentially one more soon) and they were absolute hounds. Slow and gutless, almost as bad as a contemporary Dart.

 

The B10B wasn’t a bad motor, it was almost a Volvo Mk.3 Lynx. We had several former Arriva Yorkshire ones with Alexander Strider bodies at Tanat Valley (replacing Lynxes), and they all went fairly well. There was also a pair of ex-COMS 12m B10Bs with Plaxton Verde bodies that went even better but unlike the shorter M-UNW examples exhibited some very pronounced front end lift at high speed, which could be very entertaining* in the wet.

[Zelandeth]

The (mostly W and X plate) B10BLEs First Aberdeen had (still have a few I imagine) were vehicles that I felt sorry for. Simply because they were plainly suffering such chronic neglect.

 

Despite that it was so obvious from the driver's seat that a day in the shop could make such a massive difference. Usual complains being: replace pretty much every bush and ball joint in the front suspension, sort the sodding fan thermostat, retension the belts which have stretched because the fan has been running flat out for the last five years.

 

The fact that they were as reliable as they were despite the neglect they saw was definitely a testament to Volvo.

 

Now, the B7LAs...those were another story. Overstressed and undercooled were the two words that sprang to mind...though they did sound nice from the back seat.

 

Horrible brakes too. Press pedal, nothing. Press harder, nothing. Stand on the pedal, nothing. Stand 0.000001% harder on the pedal, smack your forehead against the windscreen as all the wheels lock up. At which point you ease off the brakes, and the thing immediately takes off again. I never did master bringing one of them to a halt smoothly.

 

Other bus (coach) that used to hack me off was a B7R Profile that was their trainer for a while. The gearbox was set up wrong. It kicked into neutral when stationary like most ZFs of that era...only this one did it at about 3mph rather than when you'd actually stopped. It meant that no matter what you did, trying to come to a stop if you were facing uphill on a slight gradient was nigh on impossible as the moment the drive dropped out the bus would lurch to a halt.

 

I was well happy when they got the Bluebird AARE (from memory, YX51JVD I think) back on the road so I wound up driving that more. For all it's a horrible thing to be a passenger on, it's a cracking bus to drive. Not sure what power plant it has, but it's well matched to the bus, the gearbox is lovely and smooth (though still does on occasion get confused halfway around roundabouts just to prove it's still a real Alison box), brakes are nice and progressive and the visibility is good. She's limited to 56mph, but you hit that like a brick wall...do wonder what that figure would be without the limiter. I reckon you'd probably run out of revs around 70-ish.

 

That's a bus I'd love to buy to preserve if I had the licence, space and cash. It's such an oddball over here, aside from being a nice drive.

 

Has barely done any miles as First have had it sitting at the back of the depot (awaiting the parts they didn't want to pay to ship over from the US apparently) for virtually the entire of its existence.

[rml2345]

^ That doesn surprise me about First TBH, they don't seem keen on spending money. In saying that the ex Aberdeen B7LAs that have sat in our depot since October have been going through the workshops recently pending their supposedly imminent departure. Pity as I really want a shot.

Since passing my test I've been route training on a BMC Falcon school bus which definitely qualifies as bus shite. Great wee thing to drive though if a bit raucous.

[Zelandeth]

^ That doesn surprise me about First TBH, they don't seem keen on spending money. In saying that the ex Aberdeen B7LAs that have sat in our depot since October have been going through the workshops recently pending their supposedly imminent departure. Pity as I really want a shot.

Since passing my test I've been route training on a BMC Falcon school bus which definitely qualifies as bus shite. Great wee thing to drive though if a bit raucous.

The B7LAs don't drive too bad above 5mph to be honest - it's just trying to stop the damn things smoothly I couldn't master. Nowhere near as cumbersome as you'd expect as due to the geometry of the thing you don't need to worry about the tailswing on the trailer. Basic math I found was that you needed to allow for two feet additional clearance on a turn from the rear axle of the front section when turning sharply if that makes sense.

 

Hearing the engine respond from so far away was probably the thing I found most disconcerting.

 

I know Aberdeen had massive headaches with them in reliability terms, but I don't know how much that's actually the fault of the buses versus the depot insisting on trying to fix a complex vehicle like that on the cheap forever.

 

As for the BMCs... don't ever, ever take one out on a damp day in the winter. The demisting system is beyond a joke, all it does is make a great deal of noise and actually seems to make the windscreen mist up more rather than less. Except for a strip about 3" from the very top. Apparently the only thing worse is the headlights.

[Felly Magic]

I used to look after a large fleet of BMC Condor DP57F low floor POS, they were all badly built, and 'my' motor had a grossly under reading speedometer, at an indicated 56 what it was 'limited' to, it was doing an actual 63 as stated on the digitacho, which repeatedly flashed 'OVERSPEED', the side destination box would actually cut your hand on a sharp edge when you were changing the blinds, one of them had a nasty habit of jamming in 1st due to a faulty throttle pedal, one had the boost socket wired up backwards, so when we tried jumping it after a 2 week holiday, there was a rather loud bang, and I plugged the diagnostic laptop in, 'no signal' from the engine & gearbox ECUs. They were very closely related to the Lance SLF chassis wise, ZF front & rear axles, Voith D.854 4 speed auto, Cummins ISBe6 rated at 225bhp in Euro 3 & 235 bhp at Euro4, Metro have spunked a small fortune on them, making them all Euro5. Stupidly the body sides are 1 piece bonded on, with removable skirts, and the back end was a 1 piece mould, so minor repairs were a pain. Handling in the wet was 'interesting' due to the styeering being grossly over assisted, and no weight at all in front of the front axle.