Open topped buses

[whole diary]

[grahame]

As part of my TravelWatch SouthWest montage, I included an open topped bus in Weymouth.  I'm in the process of following up each of those images with some background, and you can see the open top bus post (here).

So how can one extend the use of open topped buses - have them being useful for moving people around even when the weather is a bit cooler and damper than you might like for an open top?    Last week, I came across these:



which while they don't have the "heritage look" would appear to offer via a canvas cover a vehicle in which you can enjoy sitting in the sun, yet be protected from the rain.   

Photograph in Norway (Olden), buses used for taking cruise ship visitors on tours of the local scenery.   It's said to rain up to 300 days per year in the Fjords - so some way of keeping the customers dry is a bit of a necessity

[martyjon]

I don't know about todays open topped buses but in the past open topped buses have had a removable roof so they could be used all year round. Many times I have passed the old Kensington bus depot at Bath and seen the tops of the open toppers there stacked up one on top of another there in the summer months. For history buffs the site was developed as a Safeway supermarket, now Morrisons, surprise, surprise.

Another place where I have seen the open toppers tops stacked up was at Weston-Super-Mare when the bus station was on the sea front there. Now thats going back some years isn't it, the sites a block of luxury flats now, surprise, surprise again.

I remember in more recent times riding the Badgerline Volvo open toppers at Weston-Super-Mare with my niece and nephews when they were children and on the top deck there were shiny metal plates all along the sides near the top of the open top which if removed exposed a recessed threaded bolt hole which enabled a bolt to be inserted to bolt on the roof and then the plate was replaced held in placed by chrome plated dome headed screws. When in use as an open top vehicle a removable handrail was fixed to the top of the front, sides and rear of the open top.

[Worcester_Passenger]

When Guide Friday (as was) were expanding their open-top city tours to a number of places (1988?), they went and talked to Edinburgh's Lothian Regional Transport about a partnership arrangement. Guide Friday felt that LRT weren't running their city tours very well. No guide, ordinary (roofed) double-deck buses etc etc. LRT said that there was no market for open-top tours in Edinburgh - "its too cold".

So Guide Friday went to the other local bus operator - in those days Eastern Scottish (now, alas, part of First). They parked their open-toppers in the Eastern Scottish depot and got Eastern Scottish to look after them. When GF^▸ (Ground Frame) started operating the open-toppers they were an instant success. So much so that, within a week, LRT had started to take the roofs off their tour buses.

Eventually LRT tried to retaliate by running rival open-top tours on GF's home turf in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Meanwhile, you might like a Swiss example, ]https://www.thelocal.ch/20170713/postbus-launches-new-open-top-coach[url][/url].

[LiskeardRich]

Morebus on the south coast have some convertibles.

They posted this to their Facebook recently showing a video of a roof being removed for the summer.

https://www.facebook.com/morebuses/videos/861976667283359/

[rogerw]

Open toppers in Copenhagen have folding back canvas roofs so that when it rains they just close the roof and open it again when the rain stops.  I experienced this on a rather showery day last summer

[Bmblbzzz]

I recently read a novel set around 1915 which referred to rain covers on the open top deck of (normal scheduled) buses. These seem from the description to have been a canvas cover attached to the back of the seats in front so you could pull it over your knees. Only a novel but seems to have been fairly well researched.

Many tropical countries use buses with no glass in the windows (sometimes with bars to stop passengers leaning out too far, sometimes without) and a tarpaulin to pull down like blinds when it rains. Again, the tarpaulin sometimes has and sometimes does not have transparent panels. These buses have roofs.

For a UK^▸ (United Kingdom) climate, to deal with summer showers, something along the lines of the Norwegian pictures seems most appropriate if it can be made rapidly extendable and retractable.

[Kernow Otter]

Morebus on the south coast have some convertibles.

They posted this to their Facebook recently showing a video of a roof being removed for the summer.

https://www.facebook.com/morebuses/videos/861976667283359/

Spotted a stack of removed roofs as their Swanage depot at the weekend.  Did wonder how they got them on and off !

[Surrey 455]

Morebus on the south coast have some convertibles.

They posted this to their Facebook recently showing a video of a roof being removed for the summer.

https://www.facebook.com/morebuses/videos/861976667283359/

Spotted a stack of removed roofs as their Swanage depot at the weekend.  Did wonder how they got them on and off !

Having been on the Purbeck Breezer route 50 many times, it never occurred to me that they would have to hire in a crane to take the roofs off. In fact I assumed that because the front of the top deck has a roof, that only the rear was removed. I know different now.

[martyjon]

In the last weeks and months of her life my late mother told me of highlights and lowpoints in her life.

After she left school she worked at a firm called Mardon Son And Hall, a well known Bristol printers who printed the cigarette packets and the cigarette cards that were placed in cigarette packs in those days (pre WW II) manufactured by the Bristol cigarette manufacturers of W.D. & H.O. Wills. In them days ALL of Bristols double deckers were open toppers, Bristol NEVER had a closed in double decker, trams that is not buses.

She told me how come rain, come shine, come dull and overcast, come freezing and fog they, meaning her workmates always travelled on the top decks of the trams but when there was a cloudless sky and brilliant sunshine like woodworms crawling out of the woodwork, the top decks were always full and they were banished to the lower deck.

She had lucky escapes as well, one day travelling home from Old Market after changing trams there, there was a daylight raid on Bristol and the tram in front of hers sustained a direct hit from a German bomb.

As the war progressed she was seconded to the aircraft industry at Patchway as an inspector on the engine production line. One day there was an air-raid and on hearing the sirens all workers downed tools and headed for their nominated air raid shelters which were also segregated for men and women. Running to theirs incendary bombs started exploding and mum and her colleagues were pulled into a mens shelter for their own safety and seconds later an incendary exploded where they would have been if they had continued towards their nominated shelter.

Then a third narrow escape ensued when travelling home on a bus from the Patchway works one summers evening a lone German bomber having released its load of destructive power straffed the home going workers as they progressed up Filton Hill with bullets striking the footpath alongside her bus and finally ripping through the bus in front of hers as it rounded the bend halfway up Filton Hill towards Filton Church.

Of tangent here I guess, the commonality here being 'open topped'.

[chuffed]

Wonderful stories martyjon. We really don't know what the older generation lived through. I recently had the privilege of talking to a womens section of the RBL and could hardly believe the stories I was told in turn by these heroines, most of whom are in their 90s .....but their memories are as clear as a bell!