Government competition for all electric bus town.

Vehicle and Fleet discussions for First Midland Red Buses Limited or its predecessor, Midland Red West Limited.
Post Reply
TimBrown
Posts: 1280
Joined: 05:59 Monday 4th July 2016
Location: Worcester

Government competition for all electric bus town.

Post by TimBrown » 05:39 Thursday 6th February 2020

HM Government have announced a competition for a grant of up to £50 million to create a trial all electric bus service in one UK town. Nice to think that Worcester City Council pursue this offer with vigour; we would have no more dirty diesel buses on the city if the application was successful. Interesting to hear reaction of First Bus management if it came to pass!

Link to Govt site;

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/brit ... the-future

TimBrown
Posts: 1280
Joined: 05:59 Monday 4th July 2016
Location: Worcester

Re: Government competition for all electric bus town.

Post by TimBrown » 10:15 Thursday 6th February 2020

Worcester City Council was a pioneer in the late 1890s commissioning one of the first hydro-electric power stations in the country at Lower Wick and introducing electric trams on City routes in 1904. We won't be seeing trams in my lifetime, but it would be great if our Councillors could put forward a convincing business case to make Worcester an all electric bus network. Reverse the 'mistake' of letting Midland Red takeover with petrol-engined buses in 1928.

Can anyone give the reasons why none of the major British bus operators, local authorities and HM Government have not even asked for cost analysis / feasibility study of re-equipping our towns and cities with trolleybus systems? I am old enough to remember Wolverhampton and Walsall trolleybuses which ran some relatively long routes.

attached is a link to listing of long disbanded UK municipal trolleybus systems;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_t ... ed_Kingdom

Reddibus
Posts: 44
Joined: 18:46 Tuesday 22nd January 2019

Re: Government competition for all electric bus town.

Post by Reddibus » 19:05 Thursday 6th February 2020

Unfortunately, as trolley buses run on rubber tyres they would under the same regulations as buses in terms of bus registrations. This means unless some sort of formal partnership is in place then anyone using a diesel bus can register a service against the trolley bus service.

The same was the case for the WMPTE Tracline service 65 experiment in North Birmingham WMT registered the weekday service commercially and went MRW won the Sunday tender they refused to put guide wheels on the nationals and the experiment ended

Post Reply

Return to “Fleet Discussion”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 19 guests