Bus Shite

[sierraman]

Operators always had at least half a dozen canabalised old coaches at the back in varying states of disrepair.

[busmansholiday]

Operators always had at least half a dozen canabalised old coaches at the back in varying states of disrepair.

And some of them had a distinct lack of reg or vin plates. One I remember was an operator who had some ex South Yorks Metrobuses. What they didn't realise was South Yorks put the fleet numbers in small print on the top deck.

Then there was another operator who didn't know about East Kents fleet numbers and then there's an original MkI National in a book that was a 'B' type when built

[sierraman]

Why did they do that?

[Inspector Morose]

There are times within a coaches life when they are too worn or old to be on the front line of tour work but the vehicle has much life yet to give. A new body may be the answer to give the outward appearance of a new coach but it is expensive and sometimes it's just as sensible to just buy new. So then what can you do with the old one? Well if your outfit dabbles in stage carriage work, why not use it s last years for this purpose? Well there are many reasons, one being no easy way for the drive to open the (usually manual - I'm talking a few years back here) heavy door at every stop then collect the fares from the passengers as they arrive at the mountain top of narrow steps.

Well if you were Harper Brothers of Heath Hayes, you employed a talented bodybuilder called Maj. Maj could build, rebuild or modify anything put in front of her and the task of rebuilding an ex frontline Burlingham Seagul bodied coach into something more suitable for stage carriage work for as little money as possible, she set to work and came up with this:

 

 

What was lacking in aesthetics was found in practicality. Here was something given a new lease of life instead of being carted off to scrap and more money wasted. Maj then rebuilt the front of another Seagull in a less dramatic fashion after an accident then as an encore built a brand new body using frames from Metal Sections of oldbury, the same supplier of BMMO body parts. The tale goes was when she was building this, she used to pop to Cannock bus station and measure up a BMMO bus (usually an S14) waiting for time on the stand to get the dimensions right. The result was a body very much like its red painted brethren mounted upon an ex coach Leyland Royal Tiger chassis.

 

 

Waste not want not, as they say.

[dollywobbler]

Can someone explain why a few years ago the operators local to me did a kind of reverse of this by fitting crappy light clusters and blanking off the big rear lights on their paramounts? I remembered it because I also saw a few panoramas with the paramount lights retrofitted.

 

Loving the waste-not-want-not element of this thread.

 

Glad I'm not the only one with the Paramount obsession. Always fascinated me how such enormous lamps could put out so little light. Smoked lenses properly a 1980s thing. I do find it sad when they get 'facelifted,' even if it is for sensible business reasons.

[busmansholiday]

Why did they do that?

If you mean swop id's, look at it this way. You have a fucked bus with a long ticket (MoT) and an identical one with no ticket. Get the one with no ticket tested or swop the plates. Much the same as Land Rovers and old Minis these days.

[Guest Hooli]

If you mean swop id's, look at it this way. You have a fucked bus with a long ticket (MoT) and an identical one with no ticket. Get the one with no ticket tested or swop the plates. Much the same as Land Rovers and old Minis these days.

 

A coach company that run the school buses I rode to senior school did similar. I'm not sure to this day if they swapped the working suspension or the VIN/numberplates around a fleet of four identical coaches, but it was damn easy to tell which one had an MOT last as it was the only one that sat level.

[busmansholiday]

OK. Who can get me more info on my VAL?

I am looking for the side trims as on this photo to get it painted back to original. I also see from this photo that it did originally have 4 opening windows. The NSF is now lane glass with no sliders.

"Golden Hind" New to Golden Key Coaches -Morgan, Bognor Regis, Kim Sandown, Kingfisher Tours Royton, and Abbeyways Halifax ("Kirkstall Princess")before I acquired her.

 

I don't do Bookface or Twater but was on the Bedford Owners Group on Yahoo before it went quiet. I had secured some side trim from a yard near Stoke so must read back to see who that was...

 

Golden Key Image.jpg

The top sliders will be a twat to get because as I replied earlier from my mate Maurice, only Southdown were the other operator to have these. My guess is the NSF has been replaced with a standard glass. It may be a case of having to live with it.

You could try Plaxtons at South Anston (near Sheffield) but I wouldn't hold my breath. Also try local bus museums (not sure where you are) as they may have contacts who 'know a man ' sort of thing.

[busmansholiday]

A firm I worked for had a Panorama I Reliance which sometimes* had to be used on one man operations. Thing was it had no power door or ticket machine fittings. The ticket machine sat on the floor by the handbrake and the cash bag was tied to the front hand rail. As for the door, well there was a piece of rope to the handle. Approaching the stop you pulled on the rope then braked suddenly at the stop. This caused the door to fly open. To close you simply dropped the clutch violently to make the front jump up. Not popular with the punters...

 

Suppose I'd better not mention the episode with said coach when the wipers failed....

[Guest Hooli]

 

Suppose I'd better not mention the episode with said coach when the wipers failed....

 

Which reminds me of sitting in the depot awaiting a working bus for my shift. Got to the last run of the morning & they found* a shitty old decker that had just come out the workshop that I could take out after it went through the wash. I rode through the wash in it chatting to the shunter I knew & laughed as the wash twisted the wiper arms together so they stood out like an arch in front of the bus.

 

I then went home for lunch & came back later for the other half the shift.

[busmansholiday]

Our bus wash wasn't that bad, but it could fuck the roof windows if you left them up.

 

No this particular vehicle had electric wipers and the motor was under the front dash which you had to open to change the blinds (remember it's a coach,). Well, on one occasion, and I wasn't guilty this time, they failed when it was pissing it down. Fortunately a friend* was on board so the panel was opened, a seat cushion placed on the floor and said friend* was told to put both arms into the panel and move the linkage side to side. Comments of 'faster' weren't appreciated, (and I may* have been a witness to this little escaped).

[Zelandeth]

Our bus wash wasn't that bad, but it could fuck the roof windows if you left them up.

 

No this particular vehicle had electric wipers and the motor was under the front dash which you had to open to change the blinds (remember it's a coach,). Well, on one occasion, and I wasn't guilty this time, they failed when it was pissing it down. Fortunately a friend* was on board so the panel was opened, a seat cushion placed on the floor and said friend* was told to put both arms into the panel and move the linkage side to side. Comments of 'faster' weren't appreciated, (and I may* have been a witness to this little escaped).

Reminds me of a similar incident that involved a Bedford Y series when the throttle failed in the middle of nowhere.

 

I definitely did not spend a significant portion of that journey dangling through the access batch with a bit of string (shoe lace actually) tied to the throttle arm on the fuel pump.

 

We totally did not drive the 15 miles back to the depot in this configuration.

 

We also were totally not proud of the fact that both the person who definitely wasn't me and the driver were able to complete this with zero drama, and even make reasonably elegant work of double declutching.

 

Again...any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental...

 

Another bus (TKS666T) had pneumatic wipers and was forever detaching the pantograph on the nearside, invariably ending up with the arms tangling together. That was eventually resolved with a cable tie one day when the driver lost patience with it, at some point that got electric wipers fitted. ...and about a month later suffered from terminal overheating. That bus was a problem child the whole time I knew it.

[Felly Magic]

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. I remember a Dennis Javelin Plaxton Excalibur where I worked that loved breaking down, and something was clearly wrong with the front end, as it went through 3 windscreens in under a month, after the third screen went, it was sidelined for local work only until fresh steel was welded around the front

[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!

 

[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.

[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!