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150 voice accordion, London

  • Thread starter Thread starter maugein96
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maugein96

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Drove buses for 12 years and never saw one like this. They normally can carry about 150 passengers, so thats where the 150 came from.

 

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Luckily you will have enough chins in there to operate all those register switches.
 
Biggest capacity I drove were double decks carrying 106, but they never bent in the middle unless we got it all wrong!
 
Some of those 150 voices will be bass and some treble. They need to be arranged properly inside the bus - shame that London busses don't have conductors anymore!
 
Worst case scenario is Friday and Saturday night when most of the voices would be out of tune!
 
They're known as a 'bendy bus'... for whatever reason.. :)
 
Hi Soulsaver,

I'd seen the type of bus, but not one with an accordion vinyl motif on the side. I thought it was a pretty clever take on the bellows, which is the name given to the component "bendy" section of the bus. They were withdrawn from London at the end of 2011, as they were not really suitable for traffic conditions there. My company in Scotland had some but not at the depot where I worked. The rear section automatically follows the path taken by the front, but whilst the bus is in its "bent" state the drivers have no view of the rear extremities at all, and in a place like London where there are lot of bikes sharing the roadway that's not an ideal situation.
 
If you could manage to get some of them to lie flat dowm instead of sitting or standing, you'd have Cassotto! :)
 
maugein96 said:
Hi Soulsaver,

I'd seen the type of bus, but not one with an accordion vinyl motif on the side. I thought it was a pretty clever take on the bellows, which is the name given to the component "bendy" section of the bus. They were withdrawn from London at the end of 2011, as they were not really suitable for traffic conditions there. My company in Scotland had some but not at the depot where I worked. The rear section automatically follows the path taken by the front, but whilst the bus is in its "bent" state the drivers have no view of the rear extremities at all, and in a place like London where there are lot of bikes sharing the roadway that's not an ideal situation.
I didn't know they'd been withdrawn.. although I did notice the date on the side in the pic was 2008.
Last time I was on a bendy one was when there was an underground train drivers strike in 2009/10. I know it wasn't the last strike... just the last time my visit to London coincided with it... chuffing nightmare.
 
I've had them lying down making strange noises on the top deck when they thought I couldn't see them. They forgot I had CCTV in the cab so that I could tell when people were about to climb or descend the stairs, and when the top deck was full. Don't think the sound they made was cassotto, more like "gruntalotto". Obviously only happened at less busy times.

Also had a group of females taking nude photo shots of each other. Shame the upper deck seats never had glass backs!

Off topic, and well off route, sorry!!

I'm retired now, but two weeks ago one of my ex-colleagues had a whole ceilidh band playing on the last bus between Galashiels and Hawick. Accordions, fiddles, drums, the lot. He decided it was better to just let them play rather than try and enforce regulations that are sometimes best ignored at that time of night. I would have done precisely the same, even if the odd passenger who didn't approve was more or less guaranteed to lodge a complaint.
 
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