John G. Lidstone considers bus longevity with a striking example from Bristol
Generations ago, bus chassis had much in common with trucks, with shared rugged and basic engineering that basically enabled the vehicle to meet the needs defined by the bodywork built upon it.
As the truck and bus industries have focussed progressively on meeting specific needs of their customers, designs progressively had less and less in common and that separation continues today.
Each generational change and fundamental innovation which comes to the British bus industry takes its basic hardware toward meeting ever more specific needs: low-floor buses such as the Dart can achieve perfectly satisfactory local service lives, but have very limited capability to run outside normal service limits. The recent New Routemaster is a design with so many London quirks, such as triple door and twin staircases, together with limited ‘open road’ capability, is likely to have limited afterlife appeal. Fully electric or battery-electric terminal-charging electrics now coming on stream are […]
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