Spectra or Trident

[The Real 4778]

What I mean is NX will not concentrate on mainly one vehicle type like the PTE tried to do .
Apart from what was inherited from the municipals, the PTE tried to standardise on Fleetlines, later Metrobuses & Nationals.
There was only 2 deviations, the VRs & the Alisa Volvos.
Compared with modern day NX & Tridents, Scanias, Enviros, Volvos, Mercedes etc, there isnt a bus which sums up the West Midlands, like the London Routemaster.

Sadly those days are long gone, except for the Boris Bus, where he's got the volume to play with, aligned to serious political muscle in the shape of TfL.  The other urban centres simply don't have the clout - or the political unity in many cases, to make anything like that happen.  Not that the likes of Centro have any Engineering 'teeth' anyway, that they could pull together a serious product specification.  All that is in the hands of the supply side nowadays. 

I know I'm showing my age here, but those Left-leaning days of bus types peculiar to the different municipals were great.  Nottingham with its cutaway Atlanteans, the unique Manchester PTE look, Merseyside's frowning deckers, Lothian and Glasgow's different takes on the dealer-stock Alexander bodywork... 

The Mercs we have in NXWM land are pretty unique to the UK.

It's for this reason that our Mercs are my fave volume local type, plus they are reminiscent of time spent in Germany, where their almost Lego-inspired Teutonic 'styling' seems very much at home!

[richie]

The Mercs we have in NXWM land are pretty unique to the UK. However the chassis are combined with the Optare Prisma bodywork I believe, a chassis/bdy combo that did sell in small pockets, EYMS have about ten of these active

There were only 204 standard Mercedes Benz O.405N built for the UK market. The first ten built by UVG before it collapsed and the remainder built by Mercedes at Tankersley. TWM got 193 of these new and later got the second demonstrator/maintenance float (becoming 1743). The other ten comprised of the original demonstrator plus two for Finglands, one for Go West of Kings Lynn and the final six for Citybus in Belfast. The latter now work in Derry/Londonderry for Ulsterbus.

The 122 Optare Prisma models were built on the higher floor Mercedes Benz O.405 chassis rather than the low-floor O.405N (just checked it out to see if I have that fact correct)

Do you know who originally purchased the two with EYMS/Whittle?

[wilmotm (Matt Wilmot)]

They are the two Finglands ones

[winston]

The 122 Optare Prisma models were built on the higher floor Mercedes Benz O.405 chassis rather than the low-floor O.405N (just checked it out to see if I have that fact correct)

Well spotted never clocked that one, forgot they were step entrance

[B.C Driver]

From a drivers point of view definatly the Trident.

The Spectra,
The dashboard layout is very poor, the dash itself is too high, the who cab has a cheap feel. Even at BC after a year or two old some of the plastic switches had cracked or broken away. The steering wheels wore rapidly compared to the Tridents, resulting in a sponge like feeling full of dirt and oil. The cab door had a gap underneath of about half an inch which was annoying if anything fell out of your pocket it ended up rolling onto the platform. Even the cctv screen in the cab is in black and white!

Driving them felt slow, bouncy and cumbersome.

Where as the Trident felt fast, solid and comfortable.

[bwsau cymru]

spectras are superb and will be a real loss when they go! I think all optare buses new and old are great!