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CHACELEY HUMPIDGE looks at buses
Page 59
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with Brian Cottee
Already the effects of the standard bus grant scheme and the swing to one-man operation are showing clearly in the "hardware" of the public transport industry, But how far is detail design along the standardization path? How desirable is it anyway, and which features are the best choice?
I was fortunate in having the general manager of Sheffield City Transport. Chaceley Humpidge, as my companion for a tour of the buses at Earls Court, for he has been one of the moving spirits in getting agreement on features of city bus design that operators wish to see standardized. And one can see the first fruits of this in "his" Atlantean at the Show—one of three at Earls Court to the new Park Royal standard design; another exhibit is for Plymouth and has the new Leyland-SCG fully automatic transmission, like the third which is in the demonstration park.
With features added by the bodybuilders themselves, this double-decker design, revealed Mr. Humpidge, really stems from meetings last year between the general managers of Birmingham, Leeds. Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle and Sheffield. each contributing something to the agreed layout. The result (as Derek Moses has described in greater detail elsewhere in CM) is a goodlooking and extremely practical one-man, front-entrance, central-exit double-decker.
Mr. Humpidge quite frankly attributes the shallow two-step entrance design, for which he pressed, to the Stockholm bus he saw two years ago, while the forward-ascending staircase is one of Mr. Copestake's contributions (from Birmingham). The big windows (5ft.
long, 28in. deep) provide excellent visibility without the weight penalty which might be exacted for having to use plate glass in even larger windows. On the Sheffield vehicle there is a passenger counter, a public address system (now standard on Sheffield buses) and a rocking-action left-foot pedal for driver control of the front doors, while retaining the sixth-position interlock on the gear selector.
Mr. Humpidge abhors a high single step from the road, but agrees that the present shallow-step entrance layout brings the passenger rather high in relation to the driver when paying his fare; so stage 2 of the design will raise the driving position about Sin. to give a driver /passenger height relationship about the same as on the current Leeds bus, as favoured by Mr. Lord. (It also puts the driver at the same level as he used to be on the old front-engined bus.) This higher driving position is already being adopted by AEC for their new LTB deliveries and, with Ministry encouragement, may become a virtual standard, thinks Mr. Humpidge.
On exits, Mr. Humpidge points to the commonsense of having the wide, safe staircase immediately opposite the doors.
Sheffield is taking a fully-automatic Atlantean and a fully-automatic Swift into trial operation and we were discussing the merits of retaining manual over-ride as we entered the Plymouth Atlantean and encountered British Leyland's director of engineering, Dr. Fogg. He explained that the prime purpose of the new fully-auto version of the SCG epicyclic box was to provide really smooth changes without slowing the change or bringing weight, cost of mpg penalties. The fundamental approach is to have the gearbox brakebands operated during a period of falling air pressure (after an initial boost) rather than during a rising pressure period, as now used.
And so from Plymouth to Birmingham. whose 72-seater with Roe body we thought dated in comparison with the new Park Royal standard, mainly because of its small top-deck windows. The effect is heightened by proximity to Manchester's 73-seat PR Fleetline which is strikingly modern and well-glazed
but, as Mr. Humpidge explained, has a central, rearward-ascending staircase inherited from the earlier forward-staircase design. A later batch will have a forward-ascending pattern.
Northern Counties' Nottingham Atlantean has an exterior which we thought might grow on one, and the functionally divided two-step entrance is good. But Mr. Humpidge thought the lower front saloon had a "scrappy" layout which wasted space—and he noted that the staircase was not directly opposite the exit. He could see no advantage in the rear destination-blind box taking up the centre of the electrically heated rear window.
Motorway coaches are something on which Mr. Humpidge has strong views: he does not think double-deckers appropriate for this highspeed, long-distance work. So the ECVV design for Standerwick started off with a basic black mark, which was not erased by the narrow, claustrophobic staircase. He wondered, too, why the interior baggage space was near the front of the lower saloon where it intruded upon passengers' view.
Alexander's choice of raked American-style' windows for its Eastern Scottish motorway coach were described as "pointless", and Mr Humpidge did not approve of the four steps (three steep, one shallow) into this singledecker. The red, yellow, green, grey and black interior scheme is a bit hectic but the seats themselves are extremely comfortable—and we found that the headrests really are head rests, unlike those on the Standerwick double-decker,
Back again to buses, where Northern Counties' single-entrance double-decker for City of Oxford struck Mr. Humpidge as an eminently practical vehicle for inter-urban work. But the driver's position is rather cramped and Mr. Humpidge did not like the instrument console intruding on space for the left foot. The Wigan one-man two-entrance double-decker has the same drawback but has an excellent shallow entrance-step layout, while the flat floor to the rear of the lower saloon, without footstools, seemed to take Mr. Humpidge's fancy.
He commended the excellent visibility for standees on Marshall's Camair single-decker for Northern but, in contrast felt that a nearside staircase as chosen by Newcastle for a double decker in the demonstration park sacrificed too much nearside visibility for driver and passengers.
The Liverpool dual-entrance MCVV Panther and the Alexander Fleetline in Dundee livery make an interesting comparison in singledecker step/floor design. The shallow entry on the Liverpool bus leads to a floor ramped slightly up to the rear but this necessitates three exit steps and Mr. Humpidge thought this failed to take full advantage of a rearengine position. The Alexander vehicle has a floor which ramps gently downwards from the front so that the exit steps are extremely shallow; perhaps a pointer to the future, thought Mr. Humpidge. But with the present design the rear saloon floor is ramped fairly steeply up to the rear and is combined with a slippery-looking floor covering. A single step to the rear saloon would be preferable, he thought.
And so to the Walsall "special". This is the CR-36 Fleetline with Northern Counties 35ft. 8in. long body. Mr. Humpidge loved it not at all. He thought the outside too plain and square and the interior too haphazard. The entrance is good but the front (ascending) stairs are rather steep and the rear (descending) staircase he thought 'hazardously steep, narrow and twisting. The lower rear saloon was criticized for a narrow channel between very deep footstools and an oddly arranged mixture of transverse and longitudinal seats of various sizes.
Back at his "own" double-decker, I asked Sheffield's general manager whether anything he had seen made him dissatisfied with his choice. "Quite the reverse," remarked Mr. Humpidge. The only point on which he had any doubts was whether longitudinal four /five passenger seats in the rear saloon were better than transverse pairs, perhaps back to back as in the Leeds bus. I left him speculating upon the pros and cons.