Evening all,
I'm idly wandering whether any of you are secret (or blatant) bus enthusiasts? I don't necessarily mean the type who stands on street corners noting down each and every bus he sees, more the type that appreciates buses old and new.
The bus company I work for has an AEC Regent and a Leyland PD2 that I'm itching to get my mits on.
Anyway, now I've come out of the closet (as it were!) are there any fellow enthusiasts out there?
Cheers.
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I know my Titans to my Routemasters if that counts :). I got upset when Stagecoach ditched its last SELNEC body type Olympian back in 2006 if that counts.
Its pretty boring here now as nealry every bus is a Dennis Enviro 400.
Last edited by: RattleandSmoke on Wed 3 Mar 10 at 20:56
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That's thanks to Brian Souter (the guy that owns Stagecoach) having shares in Alexander Dennis (the company that makes the Enviro 400).
Was the Olympian the bus you used to travel on as a kid, by chance? I was really miffed when Arriva withdrew the last Atlanteans and Nationals from Southport ten years ago. I'd travelled on them when I was a kid and went on to drive them.
I can't really see the enthusiast of the future getting all misty-eyed over a Dennis Dart or a Volvo B6.
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The B6 and Darts are horrible buses they are boring and bland but the new Enviro's are quite interesting, I can see them becoming classics because they are designed to keep the passangers busy looking at all the unusual shapes and curves. The B6s and Darts are bland 1980's vehicles designed to do a job, get the peasents moving.
Thankfully bus travel has moved on a lot the 1980's when Maggie got her evil hands on it.
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Only for the fact that I appreciated vehicles that worked and did the job. The old double decker who's name escapes me now as I am tired to death (assisted by a bottle of 'handsome' ale)
Best reg's............Martin.
Pre selector gearbox IIRC!! Y/N??
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>> Pre selector gearbox IIRC!! Y/N??
Y, Martin! A few older types had them. Never had the pleasure myself, but I can imagine that they'd take a bit of getting used to!
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Bus Anorak? nah. Been to the cobham bus museum on an open day, and the london transport museum but thats a kind of "Oh I remember travelin on that as a nipper/lad/teen"
interest.
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Fair enough, AE. Life'd be very boring if we were all the same :-)
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It was the earlier Atlantians I traveled on as a kid but the later doninators and olympians had the same Mancuncian style body work (i.e SELNEC). I think the last ones were made in 1986 and it was one of these Stagecoach operated as a Magic bus until 2006. Now the oldest bus I get to travel on is a circa 1999 Trident 2.
It used to be so interesting in Manchester upto about four years ago because every bus was different.
I sometimes go upto to the musuem and get to travel on old SELNEC buses, the last one was a 73L reg Atlantian that bought back lots of memories.
SELNEC was the combination of local co-operations merging their bus companies (south east Lancashire, North East Cheshire) but in 1974 that area became a new county called Greater Manchester and thus GM Buses was born.
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My old boss at the haulage company in Leicester had a 1966 Routemaster as a toy, he got it completely refurbished by some of the drivers on slack days over a couple of years or so. I drove it once, very very noisy and very hard on the arm muscles (even with power steering!)
I was going to borrow it for "show and tell" at my daughter's school later this year (how cool would that have been?) but he's just sold it. :-(
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My dad nearly bought one with his brother because due to its weight you don't need a PCV to drive providing it has no passangers. My dad decided not to as it would me kept on his brothers farm and that was over 100 miles away. My uncle just wanted my dad to pay for half of his toy.
You used to be able to get routmasters for peanuts but they are worth a lot of money today. It is hard to find an original though, most of have had new modern diesel engines so don't sound anything lke their old ones.
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Found it, RML2563 on this link:
www.countrybus.org/RML/RML5a5.html#fleet
Searching around that site unearths mountains of information about where some of them went. They were exported all over the world in the mid-2000s, from the Falkland Islands to Niagara Falls!
It was great running around the ring road in it, every service bus driver waved and smiled at me and car drivers were gawping left right and centre.
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Stagecoach apparantly operated them in Manchester before they bought out GM buses. This was going back to around 1992 I think but it wasn't a sucess. None of the scruffy students paid the fairs! Rob might remember that.
I really wish they would bring conductors back as the buses are too slow and I am using them a lot more now as I don't like driivng my dads car unless its essential and as he is not driving I pretty much have a constant supply of free bus passes.
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I once went to an 'office' party held in the London Transport museum in Covent Garden.
Interesting venue - hang your coat in a vintage Routemaster, eat your buffet in an old tube train.
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Because my final employer, who/which manufactures bus (and truck/lorry) components, provided me with 27 years of employment and now pays my occupational pension I can't help but have a natural affinity with buses.
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Somebody in Manchester - I have a feeling it was GM buses - acquired them around the late 80s, shortly after deregulation which was about 1986. So long before 1992. They looked very strange in orange (but maybe I have the colour - and operator - wrong; whatever they weren't red!)
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I think that a bus in this livery made appearances in Life on Mars...
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Am I the only person who likes bendy-buses?
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>> Am I the only person who likes bendy-buses?
>>
Yes
You are, without doubt, a strange man.
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Selnec were using orange and white/cream.
SELNEC........Seldom Early, Lately Never Even Coming.
I've always been fond of buses, but less so now 'cos they all look the same.
As a 5 yr old I was taken to school on a pre-war Leyland half-cab, open platform single decker......there was a low canal bridge later on it's route in Barton on Irwell.
I remember the replacements with Leyland Tiger Cubs in 1953. Flat fronted with front doors and 3 or 4 steps up.
There was a rush hour only service terminating on a railway bridge round the corner, the 79.
It was always the most ramshackle double decker on the fleet, usually a pre-war Crossley.
Manchester Piccadilly was a kaleidoscope of bus colours from NorthWesternRoad Car Co, Corporations of Manchester, Salford, Oldham, Stockport, Rochdale, Bury and Bolton with Crosvilles coming in from Cheshire. Private operator Maynes held a closely guarded licence for some routes to the east.
There were also the blue buses of the Stalybridge,Hyde, Mossley and Dukinfield Joint Board.
Happy days.
Ted
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>> Somebody in Manchester - I have a feeling it was GM buses - acquired them
>> around the late 80s shortly after deregulation which was about 1986. So long before 1992.
>> They looked very strange in orange (but maybe I have the colour - and operator
>> - wrong; whatever they weren't red!)
You're not far off, MM. GM Buses were set up at deregulation in 1986 and in 1993 was split into two divisions - GM Buses North and (guess what?) GM Buses South. All buses were painted into a kind of orangey-red livery with dark blue lining and they were swiftly nick-named the 'tomato soup buses'. Eventually, GM Buses North was sold to First Group and GM Buses South was sold to Stagecoach.
For a little Manchester bus-based nostalgia have a gander here: www.gmbuses.co.uk/index.html
And for a quick idea of what I'm on about, try here: tinyurl.com/ybg3yxt
Last edited by: Badwolf {P} on Thu 4 Mar 10 at 18:42
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BW. I remember seeing the first of the ne rear engine generation of buses we know today.
They were Leyland Atlanteans run by Standerwicks and christened the Gay Hostess service.
I used to see them on the M6 on long distance services in the 60s.
tinyurl.com/ylma58q
Ted
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>>
>> BW. I remember seeing the first of the ne rear engine generation of buses we
>> know today.
>> They were Leyland Atlanteans run by Standerwicks and christened the Gay Hostess service.
tinyurl.com/3ff84eo
The bus in the link above isn't one of the original Atlanteans used by Standerwick but is a Bristol VR. This particular one is owned by a good mate of mine and is a very impressive machine, if a bit of a beggar to drive!
Last edited by: Badwolf on Sat 3 Sep 11 at 23:05
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I will admit to having a soft spot for the old Leyland Nationals:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leyland_National
I was still going to college in Leicester every day on one of these as late as 1993. Every youngster wanted to sit in the "cool" seats, right at the back raised up above the engine. Especially when they still allowed one to smoke at the back...
The durability of these things seemed impressive, or maybe the bus companies just couldn't afford to replace them?
I used to love the whine of the gearbox and the thrum of the big straight six diesel.
Modern buses just have no character at all.
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the oldest buses I remember traveling on ( in commercial service ) was
A london transport single deck AEC Regal IV and a double deck Leyland 7RT
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There will be a *very* large gathering of buses on old wisley airfield sunday 11th april.
www.lbpt.org/events.html
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>> I will admit to having a soft spot for the old Leyland Nationals:
Oh hell yes. Now you're talking. I used to love driving these buses.
>> Modern buses just have no character at all.
You're right - totally soulless. I fail to see how someone might be persuaded to buy a 1999 Dennis Dart for preservation. Maybe a mid-90s Volvo B10 but that's probably pushing it.
Last edited by: Badwolf on Wed 13 Oct 10 at 00:20
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The Enviros have quite a lot of character but as nearly every bus is one of these I find them very boring. Manchester used to be a great place for bus spotting but not any more.
I would say the Volvo B10s have to be the most souless buses ever made. I think the 80's and 90's were the worst two decades for buses in terms of blandness.
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Anyone who wants to see old British buses in daily use should go to Malta. The Maltese are clever and resourceful and keep them running for ages.
They look especially impressive when they have just been repainted.
As a bonus, they are very cheap to use. They are a great way to get about a great little island.
Last edited by: Londoner on Wed 13 Oct 10 at 08:12
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I'm rather fond of the RT ~ upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/4UnitransRTs-2.jpg
Even the RM can get the ole juices flowing :)
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Never could see the interest in buses but give me a lawnmower or Dyson* and I'm a happy chap :-)
*Actually someone has given me a Dyson this morning so I'm heading for the workshop with a coffee to cure its lack of suck and add to my collection.
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>>so I'm heading for the workshop with a coffee to cure its lack of suck and add to my collection<<
You're a sucker for old vacuum cleaners then F/L.
:)
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Well... a bit partial to the odd Dyson restoration. They're the Series Land Rover of the vacuum world.
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>>Well... a bit partial to the odd Dyson restoration. They're the Series Land Rover of the vacuum world<<
Hence the anorak ... at least it keeps you out of the pub :)
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Whilst in Malta in 2001 amongst the two significant forms of transport I travelled on was a Russian MiL 17 Helicopter between Gozo and the Airport and a Pennine RU service bus in Valetta - I strongly suspect that the actual RU we travelled on was a bus I used to "court" on in the 70s - a very very indefinable sense of Deja Vu....
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I've been into buses since I travelled to school by Western National 50 years ago. On my friend's (unrelated) website I am known as A. N O'rak.
At this very moment there's an ex-London Transport RT doing a tourism publicity tour around Brive-la-Gaillarde in southern Limousin. Apparently it lives in a collection near Clermont Ferrand in the nearby Auvergne. There's another RT that's used as a mobile cinema in departement 79, Les Deux Sevres.
Drone, drone...
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apparently when the first proper buses arrived they were only single deckers and soon got filled up so the bus owners took steps to correct this problem
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This is for you Bb ...
Bloke from Barnsley with piles asks chemist "Nah then lad, does tha sell ass cream?"
Chemist replies "Aye, Magnum or Cornetto?"
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Hate buses. Slow. Noisy. Unhelpful, miserable drivers. Expensive. Unreliable. Hard acceleration, heavy braking. Squealing brakes.
And why are bus stops every 100 feet? For crying out loud, anyone can walk half a mile and if they can't, give them a special card which lets them flag down a bus outside their house and be dropped off back there.
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>> Hate buses. Slow. Noisy. Unhelpful, miserable drivers. Expensive. Unreliable. Hard acceleration, heavy braking. Squealing brakes.
>> And why are bus stops every 100 feet? For crying out loud, anyone can walk
>> half a mile and if they can't, give them a special card
Wholley agree with this
Driving round Darlington for some reason everywhere you go you have to dodge multiple buses, and I wholley agree, on our road (2 mile loop) there is litrally a bus stop every 100 yards or so, i cant beleive that its a requirement, as people must be so lazy they cannot walk on the flat in a greater distance
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You're an unsympathetic lot. Some of our heavier members of the public have difficulty walking y'know. I'm going to propose to the local council that they supply electric wheelchairs for use between those 100 yard bus stops. With somewhere to stack them on the pavement.
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I have fond memories of old buses I used to go to school on '91-'96
Our usual hack was a battered 1974 double-decker, a Daimler if I recall - ive not seen another. I rememeber it had a very slick 4 spd semi-auto box - the driver always change manually even though it could be fully auto as in full auto it started in 2nd and changed up very early so it would really plod along. The speedo never worked and I was on it one day when the back axle blew up - man that made a bang.
The local company that ran the service went through a phase of buying very old buses for the school contracts - they bought three early 60's buses which were even more knackered than the usual one, two green and cream and the shakiest of the lot, a red and cream one that looked like it had been imported back from africa. Fun days though, the bus ride was the best part of the school day!
A local company to me that seems to have the contract for school runs around here is running some older stuff too so not much changes. They seem to all be early to late 80's stuff, presumably bought for pennies but all look bright and fresh if a little smokey - I think the oldest is an A-reg.
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Yep bus stops are so close for two reasons
1) Crowd management, if you had one stop every mile you would end up with 100 people waiting at each stop.
2) Many people cannot work for because of many disabilities and if you have to walk a mile to your nearest stop it makes the over all journey longer, people would just take the car.
For the thing I hate most about buses is the miserable drivers. There is no excuse for how rude many of them are.
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I can just about remember buses with a wooden slatted back bench seat.
The other seats had a bit of padding on.
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>> >> I will admit to having a soft spot for the old Leyland Nationals:
>> Oh hell yes. Now you're talking. I used to love driving these buses.
Badwolf - this thread has got me doing a little research because I used to ride on the Leyland Nationals many times, but I much preferred the ones with the black surround around the lights and I think black bumpers. These sounded meatier and felt gutsier than the white bumpered models. I used to wait at the bus stop and if I saw a black bumper model coming up I'd think "good, I like the sound of these, I'll go and sit right on the engine". Sad isn't it :)
So according to Wiki the earlier ones had 8.3 litre turbo units (that operators hated because you had to remove the crankshaft and pistons to do any work on the valves - how ridiculous). And the 'good' ones had 680 engines, around 11 litres with no turbo.
Is this right?
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Nowt wrong with bus spotting i guess there's plenty of train spotters on here with there you tube vids stood on platforms.
Train spotters anoraks, but better than doing nowt i guess.
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>> I used to ride on the Leyland Nationals many times
I didn't realise that's what they were called, but the Leyland National was the bus used by my local operator in my youth. The sound on this video takes me back to being 12 again:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZIKpjG30sE
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Wasn't the Leyland National chassis converted to run on the rails..?
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Don't remember Nationals being as loud as that one Dave, i wonder if the engine cover was loose or missing to get the sound up.
As an aside Leylands with turbo's always did shift...well for their limited life between rebuilds anyway.
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Just noticed the date of this thread. I don't think Badwolf will be answering my question.
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>> Just noticed the date of this thread. I don't think Badwolf will be answering my
>> question.
He's been on this thread inthe last 24hours!!
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>> He's been on this thread inthe last 24hours!!
So he has. Must be getting dopey.
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>> Wasn't the Leyland National chassis converted to run on the rails..?
It or something v similar was mounted on a 4 wheel wagon chassis producing an excressence known as a Pacer (Class 142/3/4 iirc). Had them on the Wharfedale line in the eighties when my parents lived out that way. Even the tired old EMU's drafted in from London on electrification were better.
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I love the old leyland nationals... I've had my psv for years but I've never had the chance to drive one. It's one of those things that's on my to do before I die list; the wife keeps threatening to buy me one but I've nowhere to keep it :-(
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As an aside, Yorkshire rider or whatever they were called in the days before first used to have open days at elland road in Leeds back in the 80's where you could have a go at driving various buses accompanied by an instructor. These were open to I believe anyone older than about 13; I remember going to several. I think it's where my deep seated love of buses must originate from.
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Yawwwwwwwwwwwn (Bagpuss style)
As you drive down the hill into the city of Nice from the Monaco direction there's a Routemaster parked beside a little hotel on the left...
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
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>> Is this right?
It is indeed, Corax!
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I used to go to school on a single decker, half-cab, rear platform Leyland. Probably dating from the mid 30s, used because of a low canal bridge at Barton-on-Irwell.
I well remember the day, waiting at the stop at the top of our road, when a brand, spanking new Leyland Tiger Cub drew up. Gleaming in Manchester Corporation red, this had a flat front and was a side loader. I'm pretty sure this was 1953, the reg nos were in the NNB series.
Me ole Mam used a rush hour only service to get to work in the City. They usually managed to put on the oldest, most disreputable rear load double decker in the depot. It was invariably a Crossley of pre-war vintage complete with ' no spitting ' signs and striker plates to fire up your match for your morning fag.
The city had a plethora of different coloured buses. IIRC there were Manchester Red, Stockport Red, SHMD Board Blue, Crosville Green, Oldham, Rochdale, Bury and Bolton sported different colours and two outside operators came into the city, Lancashire United and North West Road Car Services. There may have been more but I always thought the most elegant of all were Salford's, with their livery of all-over green, like British racing green. I think they had a discreet cream band between deck levels.
Ted
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Any fellow anoraks out there? - RattleandSmoke
