Bus Shite

[SunnySouth]

1 hour ago, martc said:

Pakistan, 1953. All the gubbins on the roof is for the onboard air conditioning. Anyone got any idea what the coach is? There's a touch of Bedford about it.

That’s definitely a Bedford front end by the looks of it! Some sort of supersized OB?!

[Yoss]

6 hours ago, SunnySouth said:

One for @Yoss then, when was the last time So’ton had a pink bus brightening the place up?  Presumably there must’ve been some hideous all-over ad on an Atlantean at some point?!

That's a Go Ahead company wide promotion. 

Salisbury Reds have one. 

As do Morebus 

 

It's not the same livery but London General have a couple too. 

 

The aim is apparently to have 50% women drivers by some point in the future. That's vague I know but I can't remember the actual date. 

[SunnySouth]

9 minutes ago, Yoss said:

That's a Go Ahead company wide promotion. 

Salisbury Reds have one. 

As do Morebus 

 

It's not the same livery but London General have a couple too. 

 

The aim is apparently to have 50% women drivers by some point in the future. That's vague I know but I can't remember the actual date. 

Wonder why they went for blue in London, perhaps they thought the pink wouldn’t stand out!

50% women drivers is a noble aim, just somewhere near 100% of their roster being staffed would probably be an achievement for most companies, however.

[Inspector Morose]

Pink bus, eh?

 

Been there, done that.

[AdgeCutler]

Bendy Bus being towed by Peterbilt.

Yesterday I saw the above slightly abnormal sight on the roads of South Gloucestershire, specifically in Yate. 

I wonder does anybody know to who and where it was heading? Earlier in my journey I'm pretty sure we passed one of the panels from the bus and would like to try to reunite it.

I have now gone back and found the panel and indeed it was from the bendy.

Surely some bus nut must know where it was headed?

[artdjones]

20 hours ago, SunnySouth said:

Wonder why they went for blue in London, perhaps they thought the pink wouldn’t stand out!

50% women drivers is a noble aim, just somewhere near 100% of their roster being staffed would probably be an achievement for most companies, however.

What if 50% of the applicants aren't women? Should they accept a lower quality applicant to make up a gender quota?

[SunnySouth]

13 minutes ago, artdjones said:

What if 50% of the applicants aren't women? Should they accept a lower quality applicant to make up a gender quota?

Do bus operators turn down many applicants these days? I don’t mean that in an offensive way, but assuming those who don’t meet the basic entry criteria are filtered out beforehand, I’d have thought the overwhelming majority of those who get to an interview are likely offered a job, given that most operators are permanently recruiting and can’t afford to be fussy.

But overall yes, it’s a PR stunt which helpfully doubles up as a means to attract more applicants, I presume. I very much doubt many/any operators will ever see a 50/50 gender split, or ever realistically expect to, but no harm in trying to make it more appealing to a wider demographic.

[busmansholiday]

1 hour ago, AdgeCutler said:

Bendy Bus being towed by Peterbilt.

Yesterday I saw the above slightly abnormal sight on the roads of South Gloucestershire, specifically in Yate. 

I wonder does anybody know to who and where it was heading? Earlier in my journey I'm pretty sure we passed one of the panels from the bus and would like to try to reunite it.

I have now gone back and found the panel and indeed it was from the bendy.

Surely some bus nut must know where it was headed?

Probably on its way to a scrappy. They'll not even have noticed, probably not even notice if the back half falls off.

[AdgeCutler]

I would have thought similar, if it were not for the fact it was being towed behind a Peterbilt. It made me think that it must be somebody of a peculiar mentality that could appreciate a daft lorry and perhaps a daft bus would also suit them. I also doubt that it would end up on this side of the Severn just to be scrapped, there are plenty of scrappies on the other side of the BIG water.

[Inspector Morose]

There's a bus spares operstion with a place in Yate, scrap stuff often gets sold off under tender - maybe they were the highest bidder?

There was a spate of Kenworth and Peterbilt wreckers in the UK, indeed, I was recovered by a bonneted Kenworth when the Compressor fell of one of the Tridents in Runcorn. After dropping the bus off at their yard, he used the Kenworth to sling me around the chain hotels so I could get a room (it was about 2 in the morning by the time I got recovered).

[Dyslexic Viking]

This supposedly is Norway's first bus of this type built on a 1964 Scania.

[SunnySouth]

15 hours ago, Inspector Morose said:

There's a bus spares operstion with a place in Yate, scrap stuff often gets sold off under tender - maybe they were the highest bidder?

There was a spate of Kenworth and Peterbilt wreckers in the UK, indeed, I was recovered by a bonneted Kenworth when the Compressor fell of one of the Tridents in Runcorn. After dropping the bus off at their yard, he used the Kenworth to sling me around the chain hotels so I could get a room (it was about 2 in the morning by the time I got recovered).

Indeed, a few of them about. I’ve no idea why as a hard working recovery agent you’d want to drive something that must actively make the task more difficult, but each to their own!
 

What sort of motor was it, OP? Bendies are worth the thick end of f*ck all these days, have been for years. Outside of airport shuttle work very few places have ever managed to find any use for them that wouldn’t be better served by something a bit less, well, bendy.

[SunnySouth]

15 hours ago, Dyslexic Viking said:

This supposedly is Norway's first bus of this type built on a 1964 Scania.

Were they a success there?

The tale of bendybuses in the UK is an interesting one, nothing more than a novelty existing in very small numbers until Firstgroup decided in the late 90s that they were going to bring about the demise of the double decker, and bendies would be the future.  Or so they hoped. That didn’t age well, several batches of Wright/Volvos did a few years service and then ended up being quietly cut up well ahead of their time. Nice motors, expensive quality kit, but ultimately useless. Can’t do corners, can’t do speed humps, not great in tight city centre traffic… So, naturally, London then decided they’d be perfect! Doh…

I make no secret of the fact that I LOVE a Wright Renown, F*KING EXCELLENT BUSSSES, and the initial batch delivered to First were a bendy variation thereof. Very sexy. Alas, they no good. All got chopped, as did their later cousins.

Not my picture:

Pic borrowed from here:

https://www.lubus.info/galeria/displayimage.php?album=124&pid=1014

[Yoss]

21 minutes ago, SunnySouth said:

Were they a success there?

The tale of bendybuses in the UK is an interesting one, nothing more than a novelty existing in very small numbers until Firstgroup decided in the late 90s that they were going to bring about the demise of the double decker, and bendies would be the future.  Or so they hoped. That didn’t age well, several batches of Wright/Volvos did a few years service and then ended up being quietly cut up well ahead of their time. Nice motors, expensive quality kit, but ultimately useless. Can’t do corners, can’t do speed humps, not great in tight city centre traffic… So, naturally, London then decided they’d be perfect! Doh…

I make no secret of the fact that I LOVE a Wright Renown, F*KING EXCELLENT BUSSSES, and the initial batch delivered to First were a bendy variation thereof. Very sexy. Alas, they no good. All got chopped, as did their later cousins.

Not my picture:

Pic borrowed from here:

https://www.lubus.info/galeria/displayimage.php?album=124&pid=1014

We had a few of those in Southampton for a little while. Not for long, then I saw one of them in Glasgow which seems slightly more suitable with its wide grid patterned city centre but I doubt they last long there either compared to a normal decker. 

[Volksy]

When I worked at Leeds Bradford Airport, Airside we had about five or six Mercedes Citaro Bendies. I believe they were ex-TFL, which I think the majority of ended up in Malta, and then started randomly bursting into flames. 

They were a pretty nice bus to be fair, and as they were airside, you didn't need a PSV licence to drive them - Even rammed with about 100 whinging old dears.

[Zelandeth]

The things that killed them in Aberdeen were a combination of absolutely woeful fuel mileage, and the Volvo B7LA being under-engined, undercooled and over stressed.  They just couldn't keep the damned things on the road.  I believe the B10LA version was slightly more robust...but was apparently even worse on fuel!

The fact that the fuel usage was sufficiently bad that it almost wiped out any potential savings from the additional capacity (including standees they could in theory carry something daft like 180 people) was basically the nail in the coffin though.  They were also absolutely hopeless if there was even the slightest bit of slush on the road in the winter, not ideal in northern Scotland.

Drove a couple, and found them nowhere near as difficult as you'd think.  If the rear wheels of the front section clear something by a foot, the back will have plenty of room in a tight turn.  The way things pivot actually tames the tailswing a bit which actually made a couple of junctions in central Aberdeen (turning left from Bridge Street or Market St onto Union St in particular) easier than it was in the normal B10BLEs.  Aside from having to keep your wits about you to make sure you didn't leave your ass end halfway across a junction when you stopped anywhere, they really weren't bad to drive.* It was a bit of a strange feeling looking in your mirror and seeing that much vehicle behind you, and being absolutely completely unable to hear the engine from inside the cab, but I have to admit to being really surprised.  I'd really expected them to be far more cumbersome.

Well, except for that *one* which plainly needed the brakes adjusted.  Press pedal, nothing. Press pedal a bit harder, nothing. Press quite a bit harder, get a tiny bit of braking, press 0.0000001% harder, bounce your forehead off the windscreen.  Which when combined with a gearbox which immediately wanted to launch the bus up to 10mph at idle the moment you even thought about releasing the brakes made trying to stop the damned thing smoothly nigh on impossible.  

The big worry I always had with them was what was going to happen if one ever got into an accident at anything above walking pace when fully laden.  If you went to stop in a hurry you're suddenly going to have the best part of a hundred standees launched towards the windscreen - that sounds like a recipe for a LOT of injuries to me.

* Going forwards anyway.  Reversing the bastard things is an entirely different story, and I still recon was a dark art.  

[Inspector Morose]

Articulated buses with just two segments are so last century...

[Dyslexic Viking]

5 hours ago, SunnySouth said:

Were they a success there?

 

I don't know, but a comment under the picture said that they made about 10 of these in the 1960s, and no bendy buses were sold again here again until the 1980s.

So I interpret this as either this was not a success or there was no need for them.

Edit found this.

Quote

The first Norwegian articulated bus built and delivered by a Norwegian body or vehicle manufacturer was put into use on the route between Skien and Porsgrunn on 11 May 1964. Knudsen's body factory in Kristiansand was a very progressive bus builder under the leadership of Trygve Knudsen, who began a collaboration with the the German vehicle manufacturer Walter Vetter, who supplied forced-steered trailer chassis to Knudsen who then erected bodywork on Swedish-built Scania-Vabis BF76 chassis. The undercarriage of the articulated wagon had pivoting on the rear wheels with the help of struts, thus forcing the articulated wagon to follow the tractor.[25] The bus attracted great interest after the first bus with registration number H-6629 and build no. 1035 (Knudsen delivered approximately 1300 buses) was delivered to A/S Busstrafikk BO-Bussene in Skien.[32] Only 10 articulated buses were built in 1964-1967, of which 4 were delivered to BO buses, 2 to Glombuss in Sarpsborg, 2 to Torridalens Bilruter in Kristiansand, one to Fjerdingen Busstrafikk in Nord-Trøndelag, 1 to Södra Hjalmarstranden Trafik AB in Örebro.[25]

Knudsen was not the only Norwegian bus builder who had built articulated buses, which were part of the offer from several body factories such as VBK, Horten Karosseri A/S and Arna Bruk A/S until the 1980s, at the same time on foreign bus chassis from Volvo and other manufacturers .

There is more info on Norwegian wikipedia on Norwegian bendy buses, but google translate will not cooperate, so I add a link to the page as the Chrome browser can translate pages.

https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leddbuss

Edited October 28, 2024 by Dyslexic Viking

[Yoss]

We have two new bus routes here in Southampton. Except they're not new, they're old routes renumbered. The X11 and X12 have become the 21 and 22. It's a council contract that has been run by Xelabus for the last few years but has passed over to Bluestar this morning. 

I knew nothing about it. I was crossing the road on my way to the pharmacy to get some dressing for my finger (see grumpy thread) when this blue Enviro 200 rumbled past. I went home and googled it and it turns out that was the very first one. I didn't have my phone ready so an hour later I went for a little walk. They're not particularly interesting buses but they do come very close to home so there was no real effort involved. 

 

DOE 28 came past while I was waiting for the return journey. 

 

This has also resulted in a slight capacity boost as I don't know what Xelabus used but they were about the size of an original Dennis Dart. 

 

I don't know if it's a coincidence or if there is a crank at Bluestar who remembers the old 21. It's by no means the same route but does cover a lot of the same places (but not necessarily in the same order). It ended 36 years ago. There have always been lots of different routes between town and Lordshill as it is a convenient place to turn buses round. The 21 took a very circuitous route but I'd always take it if it was there because it went down Millbrook Road West which was a 50mph dual carriageway and you got some good thrash. It was solid Atlantean as most routes were in those days. 

This was the very last one sometime in 1988. In town waiting to depart at 23.06.

 

And the terminus at Aldermoor which was conveniently close to home, though you can't really tell through the dark and thick fog. 

This is only two stops further on from the pictures of the new 21 above. 

 

Also the new 21 covers a lot of the ground of Southamptons first minibus route, the L1. As I say it is a council funded route that serves lots of minor roads that can no longer justify a commercial service. 

It started in 1987 with four Iveco Turbo Daily's. 

And a single Metrorider (a genuine MCW one, not the later Optare built ones) 

 

Here's one of the Ivecos in its natural habitat. Note the back end of the company Sherpa. I really should have got that in the photo. 

These were all quite short lived and were replaced with brand new Carlyle bodied Darts. They were G reg, so that's about 1990/91 isn't it? Like I say not here very long at all. 

[Remspoor]

bendy Bus services in The Netherlands. They call them accordion buses. This is a double .

 

and electric bendys too

 

[Zelandeth]

6 hours ago, Yoss said:

...This was the very last one sometime in 1988. In town waiting to depart at 23.06.

And the terminus at Aldermoor which was conveniently close to home, though you can't really tell through the dark and thick fog. 

This is only two stops further on from the pictures of the new 21 above. 

Couple of nice old Queensbury bus shelters there too, still pretty new there.

...Not sure I should admit to knowing that.

[Yoss]

4 minutes ago, Zelandeth said:

Couple of nice old Queensbury bus shelters there too, still pretty new there.

...Not sure I should admit to knowing that.

Those are long gone too. 

[SunnySouth]

11 hours ago, Yoss said:

Those are long gone too. 

As is the famous portacabin that was there for donkey’s years! I presume that appeared in later Citybus days?

Going back the ex-London rolling stock, nice to see that bus design in the capital considers the needs of children…. I presume these must be toddler seats as clearly no adult could sit in them! 😂

[Yoss]

Another design flaw, or at least style over substance is the upstairs front window. The drooping side windows lead in to what might be the biggest single piece of glass  ever fitted to a normal bus which looks fancy but when you sit there it comes down well below knee level. The handrail fitted there is actually a footrail as demonstrated below. 

Mrs Yoss won't sit there because she feels that if there is an accident she might go straight through the window. Could also be embarrassing for any ladies in short skirts, not that I've been looking obviously. 

Personally I much prefer them to the Wright Gemini whose front handrail is exactly at eyeline.

Which is far more annoying than this photo might suggest. I never know whether to look under or over. It drives me mad. It's a classic case of somebody designing something who doesn't actually use it. I mean the whole point of upstairs front seats is so you can look out at the world around you. The bus designers might say it's not but we all know it is. But I can't sit there on these as I get too annoyed (first world problems perhaps?). My seat of choice on these is the one behind the staircase. 

Edit: i think this shows the problem better. 

[Tenmil Socket]

Is anyone into building plastic model kits of buses? I would like to build a 1980's double decker over winter if such a thing exits? I'm talking the AirFix type of kit... after a brief Googling they seem to be metal kits or miniatures for railways diorama.

[Yoss]

3 hours ago, SunnySouth said:

As is the famous portacabin that was there for donkey’s years! I presume that appeared in later Citybus days? 

😂

This was the portacabin about a week after First Bus pulled out last year  having just been stripped of all First branding. 

But I don't know how long it had been there. This was the original and this was definitely not a portacabin, this was a serious bit of kit. These were taken sometime in the 80s, the one with the RM is obviously summer 87 and the other a bit earlier but after October 86 as the Atlantean has post deregulation CityBus logos. 

But I'm really not sure when they replaced it. It was referred to as the inspectors hut but was also used by drivers for cashing in when they went for breaks. They did however have a separate canteen above a shop behind and to the left of this picture. It goes without saying that has long gone too. 

Also of note, the temporary sign in the front window says to and from the show. The show in question was the balloon festival on Southampton Common. The RMs didn't work Sundays so they put them out on extra services via the common. This was a 14 but diverted via the common before going back to Portswood to pick up the normal 14. There was also a 15 to Bassett Green. Initiatives like this seem to be lacking with most modern transport companies be it train or bus where anything out of the ordinary is classed as too difficult. 

 

It was a lovely hot day hence the windscreen being open. Here's a few more from the day. 

My bus with a couple of old dears. 

And again going the other way being well patronised. 

 

And RM 564 on a 15 in Daisy Road as a couple of locals look on. 564 was unique in the Southampton RM fleet in having black wheels when the rest had red. Also had a weird possibly illegal front number plate. 

 

[Inspector Morose]

2 hours ago, Yoss said:

Another design flaw, or at least style over substance is the upstairs front window. The drooping side windows lead in to what might be the biggest single piece of glass  ever fitted to a normal bus which looks fancy but when you sit there it comes down well below knee level. The handrail fitted there is actually a footrail as demonstrated below. 

Mrs Yoss won't sit there because she feels that if there is an accident she might go straight through the window. Could also be embarrassing for any ladies in short skirts, not that I've been looking obviously. 

Personally I much prefer them to the Wright Gemini whose front handrail is exactly at eyeline.

Which is far more annoying than this photo might suggest. I never know whether to look under or over. It drives me mad. It's a classic case of somebody designing something who doesn't actually use it. I mean the whole point of upstairs front seats is so you can look out at the world around you. The bus designers might say it's not but we all know it is. But I can't sit there on these as I get too annoyed (first world problems perhaps?). My seat of choice on these is the one behind the staircase. 

Edit: i think this shows the problem better. 

I have a whole series of buses that I used to categorise as 'Buses you couldn't scratch your bollocks in', mainly dealing with the cab and windscreen interface but this can get an honorary mention.

[SunnySouth]

3 hours ago, Tenmil Socket said:

Is anyone into building plastic model kits of buses? I would like to build a 1980's double decker over winter if such a thing exits? I'm talking the AirFix type of kit... after a brief Googling they seem to be metal kits or miniatures for railways diorama.

I reckon the closest you’ll get, assuming you want something UK scene, is the Revell RM kit. It’s a bit of a beast and pretty complex, but it’ll keep you busy! Not quite a “1980s” decker but there were certainly plenty of them about then! 

 

[Tenmil Socket]

57 minutes ago, SunnySouth said:

I reckon the closest you’ll get, assuming you want something UK scene, is the Revell RM kit. It’s a bit of a beast and pretty complex, but it’ll keep you busy! Not quite a “1980s” decker but there were certainly plenty of them about then! 

 

I was hoping for something a little cheaper as I’m a ‘novice’. When I used to make models as a kid I didn’t even paint them!

[Yoss]

57 minutes ago, SunnySouth said:

I reckon the closest you’ll get, assuming you want something UK scene, is the Revell RM kit. It’s a bit of a beast and pretty complex, but it’ll keep you busy! Not quite a “1980s” decker but there were certainly plenty of them about then! 

 

I've got one of those in the loft still unbuilt. I certainly never paid anything like that for it though, but then I have had it over ten years. I'm sure I'll get round to it one day. Though I'd want an RM not an RML but I'm not sure my skills are up to that. I know it's just cutting the small window bay out but it would have to be very precise if it's not going to look shit.