Chevy C-15 buses from WWII...

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Didn't Top Gear touch on these busses during their Burma special, noting that the wrong-side doors opened into the middle of street traffic and not at the curb?
 
Originally Posted By: mattwithcats
End of an era: Myanmar's 'big belly' Chevy buses from WWII face scrap

I can't believe these are still running....

And you think you drive a junker?

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/...wwii-face-scrap


Quote:
U Ming Kyi affectionately tapped the hood of his dilapidated bus. “Of course I’ll be sad to see it go. They are really reliable. The brakes are great,” he said.


!
 
I guess you could keep anything running forever if you just kept fixing and repairing it. We just have the option of replacing things, a option they don't have.
 
I read about something similar about the Philippines in an old issue of Sport Compact Car. After the end of WWII, it was cheaper to sell the old jeeps at a super low price than to bring them back to the USA.

Metal fabricators would turn WWII Jeeps into buses and tradesman vehicles.

Some were covered with rust, and look like they were hastily spliced together, others looked like long haul owner/operator trucks from India.
 
This city just fairly recently finally got rid of the last of its 1960s buses. It was quit bizarre to be riding on the same buses now that I used to when going shopping with my babysitter, back in the early 1970s.

The city even had a couple buses painted in the retro colours of those days to mark an anniversary, and were complaining about having difficulty matching the color. All they had to do was peel back a couple layers of paint and find the bona fide thing.
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Were they the old GMCs?

If so...I recall from another board that they had outlasted three generations of "replacements" and counting!
 
Yes, they were. They did last - one cannot fault them for that. It was a little strange, however, in addition to the experience I described, to be watching reruns of early 1970s sitcoms just a few years ago and seeing buses on a rather dated show that were still on the road in real life.
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They were more comfortable, too, if you ask me. It's not like the new buses the city bought allowed any real improvements for drivers. There still were no radios or air conditioning.
 
Here are a couple examples, taken not that long ago. The coloring on the first is a bit misleading - it's hard to see the blue which is pretty prominent on the side. The second is one of the retro colors, which they tried to replicate from when I was a kid. They were off a bit. The photo is accurate to the retro colors I saw in person. They should have been more brown and less red. The first picture is marked 2006; the second is 2009.

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I chatted with a (now retired) mechanic...he reported that the old buses just kept going. They were actually built to be maintained...in the late 80's, they could do a full overhaul on a GMC transit in 2 days. One mechanic could replace an engine in a day. (!) Thanks to the galvanized structure and stainless body panels, rust just wasn't a problem. He said they had a couple of them pushing 3 million miles.

The replacements fell apart. He recalls Orions that rotted to the point of scrapping in 5 years, AM General-built GMC's that had all sorts of weird electrical problems. (They wound up basically re-wiring everything on a couple, after which they were as good as the other Jimmys--and drivers liked them, because they had turbocharged 8V71s and deep gears.) There were also a couple that rotted to the point they actually broke in half at the rear door. Amusingly, they were made by Flxible.

He also reported that as of ten years ago, the oldest in service was actually a 1959 ex-NYC bus...still running a well-worn 150HP 6V71N and Spicer 2-speed transmission. He also reported that, with a full load of passengers, pedestrians would occasionally pass it on hills.
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