Plaxtons might be about to get a nice order...

[Jeremy]

30 coaches in Merthyr depot destroyed in huge blaze

A huge blaze has swept through a depot in Merthyr Tydfil, destroying 30 coaches, five minibuses and a car.

The inferno triggered a series of explosions at First Call Coaches at Pant Industrial Estate on Sunday.

More than 40 firefighters tackled the blaze which started shortly after 01:00 GMT.

South Wales Police and South Wales Fire and Rescue are investigating, with a spokesman calling it "a scene of devastation".

By the time fire crews arrived, the blaze had spread to the main workshop.

"It was a scene of devastation. Various vehicles had minor explosions," a fire service spokesman said.

"Prompt action prevented a fire from spreading to surrounding businesses."

A police spokesman said: "The neighbouring A465 was closed to traffic due to smoke and debris on the road and diversions were put in place."

Full story on BBC website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-30615428



I'm 95% sure the two buses which are still recogniseable in the photo above are Plaxton Premiers, so presumably many of the others were too - so Plaxton might be receiving a nice new order once the insurance has been sorted-out.


Jeremy

[Oonrahnjay]

     Where is the Plaxton factory, Jeremy?

[Jeremy]

Scarborough

[Iceni John]

It looks like the bodies are (were) made with fibreglass panels over their steel framework?   No aluminium roofs or bodysides?   Is that the new norm for coach construction?   Are they body-on-frame or integral ("frameless") designs?

(See, I even spelled correctly for you!)

John

[Jeremy]

I was interested to see how the roofs had disappeared as well - on mine the roof is aluminium but I would assume that the Premier must have a plastic roof judging by how comprehensively they've disappeared in that photo. Obviously aluminium roofs can ultimately melt and disappear too, but I'd be surprised if that would have happened so completely here.

The stretch panels (bodysides below the windows) on mine are galvanised steel, and I notice that those panels are still in place on at least one of the burnt buses in the photo.

There's a page about the Premier here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaxton_Premiere

It's a conventional body-on-chassis design and is available on many of the same chassis that my own bus (the Paramount, which the Premier replaced) was built on, with the obvious exception of Bedford because they don't make bus chassis any more. The Bedford chassis under my bus has big frame-rails almost like a truck chassis but looking at photos of some of the more modern bus chassis that Plaxton use it's clear that they are much more lightly-built things, to the extent where they are almost just front and rear sub-frames that the manufacturer has just fastened together for convenience with a few sticks of thin tubing. So while new Plaxtons may be technically 'body-on-chassis' I expect it's more accurate to call them 'semi-integral'

Jeremy

[Iceni John]

Interesting, thanks.   I was brought up on a diet of ECW-bodied Bristols, so my present bus's steel-framed aluminum-paneled body on a hefty chassis frame (albeit the body and frame are welded together as one indivisible whole) is what I am familiar with.

Actually, having a semi-integral or monocoque-ish body is not that new  -  the Routemasters were built that way, with separate sub-frames for the front and rear axles and drivetrain.   That was a 1950s design, so I guess that there's not much genuinely new in the wonderful world of bus design!

John

[bevans6]

Depending on the alloy aluminium melts at quite a low temperature, starting around 1220 F/660 C.   For comparison, that is cooler than where steel starts to turn red.

Brian

[Jeremy]

Nothing to do with buses this time, but I reckon Land Rover and maybe even Bentley, Aston & Rolls may be about to receive some new orders soon as well - this car carrier has just fallen over (stuck on a sandbank) whilst leaving Southampton Docks. According to the news reports it's loaded with a "combination of vehicles bound for the Middle East". So there'll be a few dented Range Rovers in there I expect.



Jeremy

[Oonrahnjay]

Nothing to do with buses this time, but I reckon Land Rover and maybe even Bentley, Aston & Rolls may be about to receive some new orders soon as well - this car carrier has just fallen over (stuck on a sandbank) whilst leaving Southampton Docks. According to the news reports it's loaded with a "combination of vehicles bound for the Middle East". So there'll be a few dented Range Rovers in there I expect.



Jeremy 

      Dunno, back when I was a useful, productive, appreciated citizen (you know, back before I got to be fodder fuh dem Gummint Death Panels and before I got my snout in dah Sochah Schurridy), we never shipped on Hoegh-Uland.  In my experience, they shipped all the Mercedes and BMW cars to N America but never Jaguars or Land Rovers.  All the J/LR traffic was on Wallenius-Wilhelmsen back in those days.  Buy you never know, everything is low-bid/low-cost now so things might have changed.  And there's a fair market in the Middle East for cars that are bought by "modifiers" in Europe/UK, rebuilt and fancied up, and then sold as custom vehicles -- those are shipped outside regular Jag/LR/Rolls Royce channels so they might go on ships that the factories don't use.
      BTW, you've never seen a car messed up until you helped clean up the mess from when cars break loose during a storm at sea.  My boss was in charge of the Jaguar tech school in northern New Jersey and he once got a call "a bunch of cars got loose on a ship that's in Newark now, there are 7 XJ-40's -- if you can use engines, transmissions, etc. in the school shop, go pull the cars out of the mess before they get bulldozed". We got there found that about 60 cars had come loose - every time the ship rolled and yawed, they'd slide across the deck into one another; for 2 1/2 days.  We found the 7 Jaguars by keying off body colours; there was no other way to identify them.   EVERY engine block, transmission casing, wheel rim, axle, etc. was crushed, dented, bent, or otherwise trashed.  Not a single major component was usable, even to cut up to use in the training school - not a single one.  We took a couple of things like steering wheel emblems etc. just for the trouble of going to Newark and sent the cars on to the crusher.  But the shipping company felt very lucky -- if one or two cars punched a hole through the side of the ship, there's a pretty good chance that they'll lose the ship so they were happy that that didn't happen.

[Jeremy]

As it happens it turns out that there are plenty of Range Rovers on there, but not too dented - from the BBC website this morning:

There are 1,400 cars on board, including 1,200 Jaguar and Land Rover products, 65 Minis as well as 105 JCB machines. Eric Williams, whose company Williams Shipping is working with the salvage team, said he was told the cars were well strapped down and not as badly damaged as feared. He said: "We were told that the cars were still strapped down in position, which is incredible. We understand that some of the heavy machinery has moved."

The big news from the last couple of days is that the ship was beached on the sandbank deliberately as it had begun to list badly very soon after leaving the dock - they are trying to find out why but suspect there was a fault in the electrics of the ballast tank system. The ship was only one-third loaded so no-doubt they were filling the ballast tanks as they leaving the dock to give the ship some stability before heading out to sea. Now the fear is that the ship will still capsize where it sits on the sandbank because the sand itself is unstable and moves with every tide.

Jeremy

PS - I have a friend who told me once about when he had a job organising the loading of cars onto car carriers, and he was absolutely bitter and vitriolic about the brinkmanship used by the dock worker's unions every time - on every occasion they would negotiate firm rates and terms with the companies in advance and then, once the ship had actually arrived at the quayside and loading was due to commence, the union would about-face and demand much higher rates etc, knowing full well that the clock was ticking and every hour of delay would cost the company tens of thousands of pounds. Suffice to say that my friend had very little respect for the way those trade unions behaved.

[digesterman]

Longshoremen here have a bad rep in many locations too, can't blame the shipping companies to minimize the unions involvement


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[Oonrahnjay]

...    ... he was told the cars were well strapped down and not as badly damaged as feared. He said: "We were told that the cars were still strapped down in position, which is incredible. We understand that some of the heavy machinery has moved."   

       Dunno about that particular ship or shipping line, but back in the old days (90's - early 00's -- when I was a useful productive citizen, etc.) they hooked an "overcenter" metal hook and lever into fittings in the deck.   Then, they'd loop a strip of mesh material that looked like the strapping in an old-fashioned lawn chair through the eye on the vehicle and through the hook on the overcenter.   Then they pull the levers when front and rear were done.  A couple of guys would distribute the overcenters out of a wheelbarrow as the cars were coming in and another couple would run along threading them up.   Each vehicle would typically take a team of two about 30 seconds (as Jeremy says, time is money when the ship is sitting still).   The kicker was that to unload them, a guy would run along with a razor knife with a long handle and slash the lawnchair mesh.   When a ship had just docked, you go on board and hear "bang . bang .. bang bang .. bang . bang bang band ..." as the overcenters fell to the deck.  Typically, they'd just drove over the overcenters as they lay on the deck.  It was a pretty flimsy-looking system but it really was a lot more reliable than it looked.
       Some North American forum readers might not know that "JCB" is a British maker of medium-to-heavy equipment like farm tractors, front end loaders, back hoes, and specialized similar equipment.  So, I'm guessing that they have a different strapping system for heavier equipment and - considering weight and higher centres of gravity, it's not surprising that they shifted more than the cars.
       It will be interesting if they can save most of the vehicles on the ship.  On the other hand, they may turn out to be like "New Jersey Hurricane cars".