The editor’s sideways view of the bus scene
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Turn another page of this magazine and you’ll find David Jenkins’s feature on the various past attempts to operate battery electric buses in Britain.
Among them was the experimental operation of the Dodge Silent Karrier in Bournemouth, a vehicle that was arguably kinder on the ear and atmosphere than the eye, unless of course you are a fan of the more brutalist styling of road-going vehicle.
It also brought back electric buses to a town served by trolleybuses from 1933 to 1969 and which purchased the last fleet of new trolleys in the UK in 1962. They are still missed by residents over a certain age and Dave Symes tells me that an elderly friend says: ‘The town has never seemed the same since the trolleys went.’
Dave also is pleased to tell me that Bournemouth has its own electric bus again, even if it is in miniature form and is modelled on one of the town’s 1950 Weymann-bodied Leyland Titan PD2/3 motorbuses built when even relatively small operators could de…
