Here's a bit of weirdness... not content with producing carbon copies of state-of-the-art Neoplans, you can now buy a modern Chinese-built facsimile of a 1950s Routemaster - complete with a half-cab, which surely has no place in the 21st Century:
(https://busconversionmagazine.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fmk%2F5%2F51%2F%25D0%2588%25D1%2583%25D1%2582%25D1%2583%25D0%25BD%25D0%25B3-%25D0%2588%25D0%25A1%25D0%259F.png&hash=22c90308a5deec87d5ecc712a16c04a679b7dad5)
Jeremy
My gob has been smacked!
It's more of a mirror image, isn't it? Left hand drive?
Brian
I hope they will soon build a 1936 Yellow. I would love to do a conversion with one of those.
Too bad we can't do that over here.
Never seen a left hand drive routemaster. And that front end over hang would make getting in and out of driveways a challenge. Looks good-but...
There is a Chinese company (won't say the name) that makes short touring buses that look like small MCI's based on the Freightliner motorhome chassis. They are in our facility frequently with electrical problems.
Good Luck, TomC
Quote from: TomC on April 25, 2012, 03:22:21 PMNever seen a left hand drive routemaster. And that front end over hang would make getting in and out of driveways a challenge. Looks good-but...
There is a Chinese company (won't say the name) that makes short touring buses that look like small MCI's based on the Freightliner motorhome chassis. They are in our facility frequently with electrical problems. Good Luck, TomC
I don't mind the "half-cab" arrangement (other than the fact that if you converted one to living accommocation, there wouldn't be a place for The Management to ride along side you) but I was looking at that front overhang and low floor. What do you think the chance is that it's a front-wheel-drive? I know the the Chinese, like most copiers, don't like to really innovate or even try anything notably outside the usual arrangement, but I was wondering. And, like most copiers, when they try to strike out into unknown territory, the results are usually disaster, even if what they're trying to do is "a good idea".
I went online to Yutong bus, but didn't see anything about the Routemaster. It looks to me to be a rear axle drive. I would think that a front drive would limit turning radius too much. Good luck, TomC
This is getting weird. It's deja vu, all over again. Does Boris Johnson know about it? (He's London's mayor.)
What's next? Maybe a brand-new Crown? Oh, my knees are trembling at the thought of it. Why stop there? We could have brand-new Ford Pintos and AMC Gremlins once again gracing our highways, along with new Scenicruisers and Fishbowls.
John, also with smacked gob
Quote from: Iceni John on April 25, 2012, 04:28:05 PM
Does Boris Johnson know about it?
That was one of my first thoughts too - I bet you could buy ten of these Chinese 'Routemasters' for the price of just one 'new Routemaster', with it's fancy planet-saving hybrid drive system. Maybe even twenty.
Jeremy
PS - Just to prove that it's not a one-off, here's a fleet of them in Macedonia:
(https://busconversionmagazine.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2F4.bp.blogspot.com%2F-EBWyU-aGiVM%2FTzWcu1QduvI%2FAAAAAAAABTA%2Fn-TEvSjV7ww%2Fs1600%2Fdg-citymaster%2Byutong%2B%2838%29.jpg&hash=5df91709e8c2bec2adc6de0ef25e410cc966f092)
I don't think that front overhang is necessarily a big problem by the way - plenty of coaches on the road with a bigger overhang than that.
There's a couple of articles about them on the Yutong website here:
http://www.yutong.com/english/news/press/09/28852.shtml (http://www.yutong.com/english/news/press/09/28852.shtml)
http://www.yutong.com/english/news/press/03/22152.shtml (http://www.yutong.com/english/news/press/03/22152.shtml)
The second article states "The bus is similar to the RouteMaster double deckers which were in use in Skopje around 50 years ago". If that's true, I had no idea the original Routemasters had travelled so far.
No technical details are given about the buses themselves - it seems unlikely that they'd be anything other than rear-wheel-drive, but the whole bus seems unlikely, so who knows?
Jeremy
Eureka!!!
I think I have a solution (to paraphrase Jeremy Clarkson):
1. The front of this bus, at least the right side, looks similar to the rump of a certain British doubledecker owned by a gentleman on this here forum who resides in North Carolina.
2. These Hooflungdung buses (or whatever the heck they're called) have their doors on the wrong side for use in London.
3. We all know how manoeuverable forklifts are, because of their rear steering.
4. Rear engines are generally preferred these days to front engines.
5. It's not a major job to swap axles, or at least turn them upside down to reverse their direction.
6. Failing that, how fast does a London bus have to go? There are also times that having lots of reverse gears may come in useful, such as backing out of a gridlocked narrow street. At those times it could also be useful to be able to drive it from the other end.
OK, can you see where I'm going with this?
Put another steering wheel and controls in the back (actually it will end up being the front), and hey presto, we have the solution to London's bus woes. Boris would be so proud of me. London could be the world's only capital city with an entire fleet of Chinese buses going backwards everywhere. What's not to like? How difficult could that be? (to again quote The Great Buffoon himself).
John, feeling really quite chuffed with himself for this out-the-box thinking.
Quote from: Iceni John on April 25, 2012, 09:03:26 PM(snip) John, feeling really quite chuffed with himself for this out-the-box thinking.
Perfect! Find a way to bill them as "green enough" to justify charging people a tax to drive on roads that they pay $5 a gallon tax on fuel already for -- "public" roads at that and you'd have a sale!
(PS People who live in N America may not know that if you drive into London, your license plate (or "licence plate" or "number plate") is recorded and you get a bill for driving in London that day and that bill is rated based on how "green" your vehicle is. I think the going rate for driving a bus built before emission controls came in is about $100 per day. This is to "reduce vehicle use in London" and "clean up the air".)
178,000 Euro's each, near enough, delivered to Macedonia. That is pretty cheap.
Brian
Just a standard run of the mill transit bus (not double decker) in the USA costs more than what one of those Chinese bus costs. I think part of the reason transit buses are expensive in the USA is because nearly all of them are government purchases and the manufacturers kinda have a captive market. The government is likely to keep buying buses no matter what the cost.
Hasn't New York City talked about charging to drive into downtown to alleviate traffic? I don't know if they would charge based on emissions like London.
US transit buses are very expensive because most are now Natural Gas. At least in the Freightliner truck side, the Natural Gas option adds about $45,000 to the price. Not even mentioning all the safety features that also add $$$. Good Luck, TomC
I thought a lot of transit agencies were going away from natural gas due to issues with the engines? I know the local transit agency is still using diesel. The buses cost about $400,000 for straight diesel and about $600,000 for the hybrids they have been buying some of recently.
Tom,
CNG or hybrid electric these days, though clean diesel is making a comeback.
Also, there are few manufacturers who build transit buses. Daimler announced yesterday that they will no longer manufacture Orion transit buses.
Buses have gotten a lot more expensive over the years. In 1963 New York City ordered about 800 GM New Looks -- TDH 5303s at $38,000 each.
-- Seaton
My gob has been smacked!
Whatsatmean?
Quote from: garhawk on April 26, 2012, 01:53:43 PMMy gob has been smacked! Whatsatmean?
A "gob" is a (not so) Propah English term for a mouth. I supposed being "gob smacked" is being stunned as if you'd been hit in the mouth but it always seemed to me to be describing hit so hard upside the head that your mouth is hanging open. Anyway, if somebody in England says he's "gobsmacked", he's pretty much stunned and amazed.
(Jeremy - is it a Midlands or Nawthunn term? I think I've heard it more there but maybe it's pretty widespread. I *have* been told by more than one woman to "shet yeh gob!!!")
From http://www.worldwidewords.org (http://www.worldwidewords.org):-
Gobsmacked
You're most likely to come across this mainly British slang term as the adjective gobsmacked; your gobsmack and another form, gobstruck, are less common.
Gobsmacked combines the northern English and Scottish slang term gob, mouth, with the verb smack. It suggests the speaker is utterly astonished or astounded. It's much stronger than just being surprised; it's used for something that leaves you speechless, or otherwise stops you dead in your tracks. It suggests that something is as surprising as being suddenly hit in the face.
Though the trail of written evidence was until recently believed to date only from the early 1980s, we knew it went back a lot further in the spoken language. A report in the Guardian in February 1985, relating an encounter with the famous footballer Sir Stanley Matthews, implied that it was even then 40 years old. This is supported by a recent find:
I'm so amazed that only the Malderbury dialect can express my condition: "I'm properly gob-smacked".
A Woman of Bangkok, by Jack Reynolds, 1959. A version of the text was published in 1956 as A Sort of Beauty. There's no such place as Malderbury.
Gobsmacked, like gob itself, comes from northern English and southern Scottish dialects. One reason why it starts to appear in print in the 1980s it that it was used by the writers of gritty television series set in northern cities, such as Alan Bleasdale's Boys from the Blackstuff, about five Liverpudlian tarmac layers, and Coronation Street, set in a fictional suburb of Manchester (Jeffrey Miller included it in his glossary Street Talk — The Language of Coronation Street in 1986).
It was taken up shortly afterwards by broadsheet newspapers such as The Times, the Sunday Times and the Independent as well as the Guardian and by politicians who used it to display their demotic credentials. It has since travelled widely. William Safire commented in The New York Times in 2004 that the "locution is sweeping the English world". The success of the Scottish singer Susan Boyle in BBC television's Britain's Got Talent in 2009 led to a further boost, since she used it copiously in interviews.
It's an obvious derivation of an existing term, since gob has been a dialect and slang term for the mouth for four hundred years (often in insulting phrases like shut your gob! to tell somebody to be quiet). It possibly goes back to a Scottish Gaelic word meaning a beak or a mouth, which has also bequeathed us the verb to gob, meaning to spit. Another form of the word is gab, from which we get gift of the gab.