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Former Edmonton Transit buses found


tmx218

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Ah but that is only a little part of what the collective experiences of some of the board members has been...

Kinda the same with a car, once you have one, you never have money again :(

.... or a wife! :P

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99% of the time when you find a bus "sitting,corroding into the ground" it isn't a GM. I'm usually pretty happy when that 1 in 100 bus comes along and it IS a GMC.

Having said that, here in Montana there are a number of school buses sitting around that are pretty famn sweet sitting around.

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I guess I should add in my nickels worth of free advice on bus ownership. Buses are fun to look at and dream about fixing, however they cost a fortune. I bought Ex-Edmonton transit 638 for $1500 and thought it was a good deal. I ended up spending about $1500 to tow it from Edmonton to Calgary. And even #22, I ended up paying $22,000 to buy, restore, and transport down the bus to Calgary. Out of that $22,000, $10,000 was for mechanical stuff that needed repairs (bulkhead welding, replace king pins, replace suspension components, re-weld the front step well, mechanical inspections, brake replacement, etc.) and mechanical was $150/hr back in 2004, those prices have most likely doubled by now. Even the paint job I got cost $6300 with some minor body work (rust repair and some corrosion repair). That same paint job should have cost me $12,000 back then in 2003, so the prices may have inflated higher now too. That gives you a rough idea of costs to operate a bus and restore it. Even if a bus is a good candidate for restoring and you got one cheap enough, they are still not really worth buying to restore. The only buses in Alberta for fishbowls even worth saving is one of the in service Spruce Meadows TDH5303's as mechanically, they are always inspected and repaired twice a year. Even so, the bodies on them are a little rough as they have dings and dents on the silversides and rust is starting to pop through. Last I heard is they wanted $5000 to sell a bus.

As for the buses at A1 Auto Salvage in Edmonton, the fishbowls are in rough shape as a lot of them have been sitting for at least 10 years, some of them have been sitting almost 25 years in the same spot. They would be better suited for static display as mechanically, they would be all in poor shape. Seals blown, engines and trannys probably seized or in extremely rough shape, air lines cracked, brakes seized, door components failed. They are worth more in scrap metal than selling to a foamer. I was just discussing with the owner of A1 Auto salvage that there were foamers interested in buying buses, however he said he has no interest in selling most of them as they are buried so deep and and it would take months to unbury most of them. He plans on sending them off to scrap soon as he has been talking about this for the past year when time permits for him

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  • 10 months later...

Went and checked out A1 again. Got in this time. Bad news though, he (owner) said he was wanting to get rid of 20-30 buses. This means Brills, Jimmies, and his D60...

There might need to be a group going down there to see them for the last time.

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  • 1 year later...
  • 11 months later...
  • 3 years later...

Revival time. Passport #93 was spotted emerging from an industrial park in Richmond, BC yesterday afternoon (November 3). Said park was not far from the headquarters of Landsea Tours who operate a lot of IC buses, except they're all high floors with champion bodies, so I don't think #93 was one of theirs.

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I was just wondering what ever happened to those. 

They were low usage, only in the fleet for 5 years, however at the end there were a number of them that had not run for quite some time... there seemed to be reliability issues.

ETS seemed to struggle to keep enough running for highway runs, as there were a few of those that were the only highway equipped cutaways so were needed for the 599.

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1 hour ago, M. Parsons said:

I was just wondering what ever happened to those. 

They were low usage, only in the fleet for 5 years, however at the end there were a number of them that had not run for quite some time... there seemed to be reliability issues.

ETS seemed to struggle to keep enough running for highway runs, as there were a few of those that were the only highway equipped cutaways so were needed for the 599.

Navistar products haven't really been the best in recent years. Even when they were still decent, they had issues. Here in Vancouver, we've had Navistar products in community shuttle service at several points in time and many of them had issues. We got rid of our Orion IIs (which had the otherwise solid T444E) due to exhaust leaks that travelled into the cabin and poisoned occupants. Our Ford E450 cutaways with the VT365 engine were junk because those engines are junk unless extensive, expensive modifications were made (not sure why cmbc didn't just get gas ones after they stopped making the T444E). Most recently, we had Champion-bodied IC AC shuttles that had the crappy MaxxForce 7 engine, the same exhaust leak issues as the Orion IIs, and a few caught on fire and were totaled out as a result (one of the fires occurred after they were all retired and sold off). We have only purchased Chevy Express cutaways for our shuttles since then and the only Navistar products still in service with CMBC (to my knowledge) are trolley deicing trucks.

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ETS maintenance is a part of a large empire that encompasses all city vehicle maintenance except LRT. International's make up a SIGNIFICANT portion of the City fleet so theoretically the knowledge base and parts supply are there. 

On the the other hand, that might not be availible to the transit side of things. 

It also could be that it was an issues related to the ElDorado side of the bus, as those 6 were the only ones in the fleet. ETS did choose to preserve one of the Passport HD's over a GM chassis Passport so there is that too. 

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2 hours ago, M. Parsons said:

ETS maintenance is a part of a large empire that encompasses all city vehicle maintenance except LRT. International's make up a SIGNIFICANT portion of the City fleet so theoretically the knowledge base and parts supply are there. 

On the the other hand, that might not be availible to the transit side of things. 

It also could be that it was an issues related to the ElDorado side of the bus, as those 6 were the only ones in the fleet. ETS did choose to preserve one of the Passport HD's over a GM chassis Passport so there is that too. 

First time I've heard of someone preserving shuttles. TransLink/CMBC don't even preserve, only West Vancouver Transit (who have a fishbowl and D40LF). A few ex-cmbc units are preserved by a npo but that's it.

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