A necessary but often overlooked element of a bus company’s stock are their training vehicles. These are generally found to be front-engined, half-cab double-deckers, mainly due to them being the key portion of a company’s fleet. Here Bus Company Training Vehicles pays tribute to these essential items and takes a look at the assortment of vehicles used over the last 50 years. It examines how they were modified for their role, with alterations taking place to enable communication between the instructor and the trainee driver.
In general the buses used were either cascaded down in the company, becoming trainers as they got older, or they were bought in from another group to supplement stock rather than using a bus out of their own fleet. Sometimes vehicles were acquired from another company due to a specific need, such as requiring a bus with a manual gearbox when there was none in their own fleet. Early training buses would frequently run in the customary fleet livery with only the addition of ‘L’ plates, although in some instances they were given a different livery designed to signal their use to other traffic.
Training vehicles often survived after general fleet examples had been scrapped and several of the buses featured continue to exist in preservation, having been re-liveried and restored to their original bus design.
The introduction is followed by an interesting selection of colour and black & white photographs, generally in 2 per page format and accompanied by informative captions, all of which were taken by the author, Malcolm Batten. 180 pictures. 96 pages.