So followin my dramas in Rotterdam the night before, my reason for the in the Benelux was to attend Busworld in Kortrijk's exhibition centre, Xpo. Busworld is a bus and coach industry trade show aimed primarily at continental European and near-Asian operations. British operatioons tend to rely on domestically built buses and there are separate shows for the UK market (Euro Bus Expo and Coach & Bus Live in the NEC, Birmingham), whilst the French also have an annual show (mainly school buses and odd ball minibuses) called Transports Publiques, held in Paris.
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| A note about getting to Kortrijk part 1: everyone in the UK knows that foreign railways are always more reliable [sic, they're not]. Here's Nederlands Spoorwegen reminding us they own Abellio! |
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| A note about getting to Kortrijk part 2: the bus service from the station to the Xpo Centre (routes 1/2/13) stops on the main road. There is no footpath in to the Xpo North Entrance! Just a wall and a lake! |
The purpose of this blog post is to look at the buses and technologies on display. It comes with a health warning that I might have ignored things (e.g. Turkish buses) and I might be overly enthusiastic just because I found a native English speaker on certain stands!
So, having started by saying this is all about continental European buses, welcoming people at the Xpo North Entrance was the Build Your Dreams (BYD) fully plug-in electric double decker prototype, resplendent in London red and shortly to be delivered to Metroline at Willesden bus garage. Worthy of a little look, I thought.......
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| Overview of the vehicle, already adorned with all the fleetnames and lettering it needs for London. It will be fleet number BYD1471 with Metroline, which seems a little out of sequence as Metroline are currently in the low 2000s with new deliveries. |
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| Ugly - looks a bit like the Duple Metsec double deckers in Hong Kong. It was just badged as a BYD E-Bus but I understand it's proper type designation is a B8SR |
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| Not many seats down stairs. Three rows of seats up to the rear/ The rear seats are on the rear wheel arch so no rear facing seats: the whole rear overhand downstairs is taken up with the battery pack. |
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| Upstairs there is an amazing amount of legroom. I assume the lack of seats (and thus capacity, remember no standing allowed on the upper deck) is to keep the weight down. |
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| None of the internal access panels are locked. All four clips were opened and the panel removed. |
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| Somewhat bodged together internal panelling. |
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| External panels are all locked, including the bonnet. All locks are covered by rather flimsy covers that the garage fitters will have off within a week! |
It must be remembered this bus is a proof-of-concept - cum - prototype. The BYD staff on the stand are very proud of the vehicle: indeed Chinese ambition is to sell vehicles in Europe and the UK and it is indeed very prestigious that Transport for London have chosen to take on this vehicle, and presumably pay a reasonable whack for it. However in common with my experience of Chinese buses the build quality is very poor: I felt the internal panels could be removed by hand. Combined with the interior access panels all being open access, I am not sure it will last long on the mean streets of Cricklewood: at the very least Metroline will need to be bringing it home at dusk. It also has a very low capacity compared to a regular double deker - 54 seated compared to 61-67 on Enviro 400s) so may not be best used on a regular duty in the peaks. Rather I can see this tottering around an an 'extra' in the interpeak until the wrinkles are worked out. With BYD joining forces with ADL for the Red Arrow fleet, I do wonder how long it will be before see the the battery pack under an Enviro 400.....now that will be interesting!!
