As it reaches the 20th anniversary of the first example going into service, the Dennis Trident is fast disappearing from London’s streets. MATTHEW WHARMBY pays tribute in words and pictures to one of the most successful first generation low-floor double-deckers to serve the UK capital.
After 20 years, the careers of London’s first generation of lowfloor double-deckers are coming to an end.
Low-floor single-deckers arrived in London in 1994 and as the development of accessible double-deckers finally came within corporate accountants’ best measure of cost-effectiveness towards the end of the 1990s, a four-way race developed between the manufacturers of the time to design, build and put into service the first examples.
DAF arrived first with the low-floor version of its DB250RS in October 1997, but Dennis’s Trident was a solid second announced in 1998 and it immediately garnered much larger orders, particularly from Stagecoach’s East London and Selkent subsidiaries, which eventually had nearly 1,000.
Volvo had got off to a false start, turning up at the 1997 Coach & Bus show with a chassis that operators — especially in London — had already rejected. This was a double-deck version of its pan-European …
