I will leave my post for the Plymouth rally for tomorrow, though I can just say that I have absolutely loved today's rally and can't wait for tomorrow to do it all again except its BIGGER!
Though tonights post is on my journey home.
On the way back I had 32760 which had quite literally just come back from Plymouth after being fixed, with driver Jamie Limb at the helm. Things were going quite well and 60 was preforming better than most of the Tridents seem to these days.
Though on reaching the junction at Tregantle Fort Jamie swung the wheel to left left, there was a loud THUD and the bus dived to the right!!! Luckily this was at a low speed so nothing bad happened. But if it had been just a few more minutes then the results could have been catasptrophic going along Witsand Bay.
After a minute or two of letting the bus settle the wheels did decide to change direction so that Jamie could pull her in to the layby at Tregantle. After a call to Engineering at Plymouth, the result was that that there were no spare buses avalible at Torpoint (should have kept C412!) and that a bus would have to come out from Plymouth to replace the Trident, likely to be the bus that will soon replace C413 HJN, K801 ORL, though this would be a good 1hr and 30mins away at least. Therefore it was quicker to wait for the 81C behind, this being Steve around 40minutes behind us. We therefore boarded her to continue the journey.
But it is funny to think that I've been riding round on a load of lovely old buses all day, some as old as 50, without any problems at all! Yet a modern Dennis Trident is the thing that let me down!
They don't make them like they used to!
the older buses only go out afew time a year whereas the new one are near enough used all day every day, if you drove a car from 6 in the morning till 6 at night or later non stop year round you would soon see why there are breakdowns!
ReplyDeleteAll true, yet even when Torpoint was VR operated, there were a lot less breakdowns, these were 25 year old vehicles. These Tridents are only coming up for 5 years old, and you would think they'd be better engineered than they are. These have no chance of lasting as long in service as the VRs and Olympians have and really the reliablilty with these can only get worse.
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