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Mitdish · September 9th 04, 09:04 PM posted to uk.transport.london

From: (Boltar)
Date: 08/09/2004 16:52 GMT

And a modern double decker weights 11 or 12 tons. You have to wonder where
that extra 3 or 4 tons of flab was needed. As for the 16 ton bendy busses...
Arn't vehicles supposed to become more efficient as the years go by? How
can adding tons and tons of extra weight to these vehicles accomplish that?

B2003

Hit the nail on the head mate! Colin Curtis, one of the original RM design
team, has gone on the record more than once to say that "Bill" Durrant (his
boss) and the rest of the team were overjoyed back in 1954 to find they could
build a predominantly aluminium chassisless bus seating 64 passengers that only
weighed the same as an RT with 56 seats. Less weight = less fuel consumption,
and when you think about it by the end of its life you've probably paid more
for the fuel to make it move than you paid for the bus itself (even allowing
for fancy financial footwork like Net Present Value calculations) so that's a
saving worth having.

Durrant, Curtis et al got it right. Hendy has got it sadly wrong I'm afraid
(but then earlier in his career he was Personal Assistant to Ralph Bennett
after all, the only chairman of the London Transport Executive ever to get the
sack for incompetence as far as I know - and from a Tory GLC too if I remember
correctly! So maybe that might explain a few things. A few of Bennett's
slipshod way of doing things might have rubbed off on Hendy and are coming out
now to our ultimate disadvantage).