Preserved Buses

[old50niner]

Yes, the Fleetline had to be driven and not aimed!   Before I get howls of protest, I accept there wasn't so much traffic on the road then.  A magnificent machine though, and, when you got the pedal to the metal, it actually moved.   No delays in moving off like there is now.

[barry619]

Yes, the Fleetline had to be driven and not aimed!   Before I get howls of protest, I accept there wasn't so much traffic on the road then.  A magnificent machine though, and, when you got the pedal to the metal, it actually moved.   No delays in moving off like there is now.

Yes, however there is a lot less potential for driver abuse in a new bus than there is in an old semi-auto Fleetline.

[Tiptonian]

Fleetline.

No delays in moving off? - Yes.

Pedal to the metal? - Keep it there for more than 15 seconds and air would get into the hydraulics!

Driven not aimed? - The steering was either very heavy or drifted all over the road. The wheel had to be repeatedly "flicked" to one side or the other to keep them in line.

Not so much traffic? - In certain parts of the Black Country, there was just as much traffic due to different road layouts and shopping habits. Brierley Hill, Quarry Bank, Cradley Heath, Old Hill and Dudley were constantly choked with traffic and shoppers (no Merry Hill,  Russells Hall Hospital, no by passes at Dudley, Cradley Heath, Old Hill or Brierley Hill). The Midland Red based schedules did not help.

Driver abuse? - This is an old turkey that should have been laid to rest years ago. If a driver changes down at too-high revs, it is the engine, not the gearbox that gets wrecked. If a driver flicks gears upwards without pausing, he is only doing what all automatic gearboxes did then and do now (stop and think about it before having a knee-jerk reaction). No automatic control system cured the Daimatic or SCG gearbox life problem. The gearbox, derived from a pre-war design, was simply not developed enough to handle the work. Don't forget, some Midland Red S17s (an 11 metre 6.5ton 52 seat singledecker with SCG gearboxes) subjected to the same "driver abuse" completed their service lives without ever having their gearboxes changed!

Magnificent machine? - No. With constant steering problems, poor suspension, short life brakes (handbrakes needed constant adjustment, rear lining life of 8 -10 weeks, not a quick renewal job), gearbox life 80,000 miles, later improved by a WMPTE modification, they were not strong enough or reliable enough. The Metrobus was far more reliable.
Overall, they were adequate, but should have been developed into a much tougher vehicle by 1968, by which time their weaknesses were well known.

There is a tendency to look at old buses through rose-tinted spectacles. I will mourn the passing of the Optare Spectra and Volvo B7TL President. I did not miss the Fleetline or Metrobus.

However, every bus has its good points. The Fleetlines were fantastic in the snow!!

[Stuharris 6360]

Fleetline.

No delays in moving off? - Yes.

Pedal to the metal? - Keep it there for more than 15 seconds and air would get into the hydraulics!

Driven not aimed? - The steering was either very heavy or drifted all over the road. The wheel had to be repeatedly "flicked" to one side or the other to keep them in line.

Not so much traffic? - In certain parts of the Black Country, there was just as much traffic due to different road layouts and shopping habits. Brierley Hill, Quarry Bank, Cradley Heath, Old Hill and Dudley were constantly choked with traffic and shoppers (no Merry Hill,  Russells Hall Hospital, no by passes at Dudley, Cradley Heath, Old Hill or Brierley Hill). The Midland Red based schedules did not help.

Driver abuse? - This is an old turkey that should have been laid to rest years ago. If a driver changes down at too-high revs, it is the engine, not the gearbox that gets wrecked. If a driver flicks gears upwards without pausing, he is only doing what all automatic gearboxes did then and do now (stop and think about it before having a knee-jerk reaction). No automatic control system cured the Daimatic or SCG gearbox life problem. The gearbox, derived from a pre-war design, was simply not developed enough to handle the work. Don't forget, some Midland Red S17s (an 11 metre 6.5ton 52 seat singledecker with SCG gearboxes) subjected to the same "driver abuse" completed their service lives without ever having their gearboxes changed!

Magnificent machine? - No. With constant steering problems, poor suspension, short life brakes (handbrakes needed constant adjustment, rear lining life of 8 -10 weeks, not a quick renewal job), gearbox life 80,000 miles, later improved by a WMPTE modification, they were not strong enough or reliable enough. The Metrobus was far more reliable.
Overall, they were adequate, but should have been developed into a much tougher vehicle by 1968, by which time their weaknesses were well known.

There is a tendency to look at old buses through rose-tinted spectacles. I will mourn the passing of the Optare Spectra and Volvo B7TL President. I did not miss the Fleetline or Metrobus.

However, every bus has its good points. The Fleetlines were fantastic in the snow!!

Surely, if anythings, Midland Red schedules were a lot less strenuous on buses than the WMPTE ones.

[Tiptonian]

WMPTE derived all of their schedules, quite naturally, from the constituent Corporations and the Midland Red services taken over in 1973. Generally, the latter in the Black Country were timed tighter than all of the Corporations with the exception of Walsall, with which they were on par. 

Accelerations in the eighties consisted of the existing schedules with reduced layover times. At one time, this completely wrecked the highly profitable and reliable 245/246 service (Stourbridge-Dudley-Wednesbury, known since tramway days as the D'n'S), and it had to be hastily re-worked. I think hastily in those days was about three months. At one point, the Stourbridge- Birmingham 130 was combined with the Quinton-Birmingham 9, which was to a much slower timing. The Quinton drivers were most displeased when they found out they would have to run to the 130 timings! Years later, West Midlands finally achieved its ambition and closed the last ex BMMO garage (Hartshill). Drivers who found themselves on Corporation work in Wolverhampton and Quinton were heard to say it's like a holiday!

I have not managed to keep up with the many changes in the area since I moved away in 2001, but recent visits to the Black Country seem to show a necessary overall easing (rightly so) in the interests of reliability.

[Stevo]

I agree with much of what you say about the Fleetline, but don't understand the comment about air in the hydraulics. Pedal to the metal refers to the accelerator which I thought was purely mechanical. The trouble with the weak gearbox was made worse by the fact that it was driven through a fluid clutch. 'Normal' automatics always drive through a torque convertor which absorbs the shocks of the lower gearchanges but if you read road tests of the 1970s you will see that the extra fuel consumption of a torque convertor wasn't considered a price worth paying. The drivers on 4613 had no trouble achieving good gearchanges but that care was rarely forthcoming in the 70s and 80s.

[barry619]

Driver abuse? - This is an old turkey that should have been laid to rest years ago. If a driver changes down at too-high revs, it is the engine, not the gearbox that gets wrecked. If a driver flicks gears upwards without pausing, he is only doing what all automatic gearboxes did then and do now (stop and think about it before having a knee-jerk reaction).

You are wrong, plain and simple, and I would suggest that you would do well to learn about what you're attempting to lecture on before decrying everyone else's views on the topic.

A semi-auto uses brake bands and epicyclic gears and absolutely is not intended to be up-shifted with the throttle open. By doing so, you are causing said brake bands - a friction component - to attempt to slow the full force of the engine under load, which does nothing for their longevity and is the exact reason why semi-auto gearboxes can be destroyed in a matter of weeks by continual abuse from poor drivers. Equally when changing down at too high speeds and without attempting to match the engine speed to road speed, the brake bands are what takes the brunt of the shock before it has reached the engine.

A full auto of the Voith or ZF kind does not use brake bands and neither does it use epicyclic gears, and is of a totally different design to a semi-auto. Neither does it utilise fluid coupling between the engine and gearbox, another component easily damaged by poor driving standards in a semi.

A full auto is designed to shift up when under load; a semi-auto of the kind fitted to Fleetlines and so on is not.

I suggest that you speak to someone of a mechanical mindset who has experience of repairing wrecked semi-autos as a result of driver abuse and see what they have to say about your incorrect 'facts'.

[old50niner]

Have to agree with Barry 619, was taught to pause in ''neutral'' on upward changes and, give a slight rev in ''neutral on downward changes.   Made for much smoother changes.   Was good enough to get through the test.

[Stevo]

Technically Barry 619 is wrong - Voith, ZF and Allison autos (except automated manuals) use epicyclic or planetary gears which are engaged by some kind of clutch, which is what the brake bands on the Fleetline gearbox are. But the comments about older epicyclic gearboxes and the fluid clutch are spot-on. London Transport in its Merlins, Swifts and Fleetlines arranged for the automatic operation of the gearbox to start in second and to change up under full load - just about the worst treatment you can give to such a transmission! LT got away with it in the RM, but loads were lighter and the transmission kept cooler. I was very glad when the Metrobus came along with its smooth Voith.

[Liverpool Street]

You all know too much, I just used to rag it through with no regard for its mechanical components. Often complaints from old dears at the time, 'oh you nearly broke my neck'  same old dear who'd give me toffees the week later.

[Tiptonian]

Fleetline accelerator.

The linkage between the accelerator pedal and fuel pump was a simple hydraulic system, as would be found on the brakes of a 1950s /1960s car without servo assistance. There was a small plastic reservoir (which I understand was usually in the cab) for the fluid, a master cylinder under the cab floor, and a slave cylinder mounted on the engine next to the fuel pump. If the bus had been run at full power (sometimes not for very long!), power would tail off due to air either being present in, or leaking into the fluid pipe. If releasing and re-applying the accelerator did not work, the driver would have to reach down and pull the pedal up manually. For some reason, the Leyland engined examples did not suffer in this respect as much as those with Gardner engines.

Gearbox life and barry619.

I do not seek to lecture on this, but to encourage thought and debate on an over-simplification of what happened at the time.  Yes, some drivers did treat these devices in an unsympathetic way, but from what I saw, most did not, but with the passage of time, it seems to now be taken as fact that the gearbox problems suffered by the Fleetline and Bristol VRT were all down to driver abuse. This is simply not true. The proof is that many other types of vehicles including Daimler CV, Leyland Titan, Leopard, Atlantean, and various AECs and BMMOs all operated successfully with what was fundamentally the same type of gearbox. No-one would suggest that a driver would change his habits due to a different type of vehicle, so something else must be considered, eg vehicle weight, high temperature environment, under-development of the unit for that vehicle, and even tight scheduling.  I would even suggest that most of the fully-automatic systems applied to these gearboxes, including that on the Routemaster, did shift up when under load, and actually made it impossible to match the revs up or down.

I do not pretend to know the internal workings of a Voith or ZF auto. It has been many years since I saw such diagrams, but I do appreciate there are no brake bands. If I recall correctly though, the gearing does not work on a layshaft, so I assume it must have some form of epicyclic gear. I am more than happy to be corrected on this.

barry619, it is your last paragraph that troubles me. It is the inference that driver abuse alone has caused sudden catastrophic failure of gearboxes, which is what I have taken you to mean by "wrecked". Has this frequently been the case? I did speak at length to engineers/mechanics at the time, (yes, I was very nosey!). The consensus was that, while it would help if drivers were more careful, in the end they simply wore out.

[James4368]

Saw London transport green NLE627 near M42 while onboard 6702 900 towards airport 0935

[James4368]

for anyone interested

B6 669 S669VOA is attending Showbus 2015 at Woburn Abbey on 20/09/15

[The Real 4778]

for anyone interested

B6 669 S669VOA is attending Showbus 2015 at Woburn Abbey on 20/09/15

I wonder how it will get there....   ;D

[HTA844N]

I wonder how it will get there....   ;D

What are you implying?

669 has clocked up nearly 950 faultless miles since leaving NX. Therefore the 90 miles each way to showbus should be a walk in the park!