Aston Manor

Road Transport Museum

208-216 Witton Lane, Birmingham, B6 6QE

Metrobus Project.

This section usually features restoration projects, but this time we are featuring quite the opposite. To begin with I shall explain the reasons behind what we have done. The Museum owns a West Midlands Metrobus, not any old Metrobus but one of the Tracline 65 guided buses. Plans are to restore this in original guided form, and is likely to be the only survivor in this form. As we know only too well from trying to keep our older vehicles on the road, spares can be difficult to find sometimes, if only we had a donor D9 for spares for example it would be very useful. With this reasoning we decided to purchase a withdrawn Metrobus direct from West Midlands solely for use as spares while such vehicles are available. As it costs money to store a complete vehicle, the plan was to break the Metrobus, keeping useful parts, mainly mechanical/electrical for use in the future.

The deal was done, and West Midlands very kindly delivered 3023 to us, with one day of MOT remaining.

It was already decided this was a job to be done as quick as possible, carefully saving what we need, and scrapping the rest, so dismantling would be quite brutal at times. It's not very often anyone gets the chance to break a bus in this way, so we decided even just for novelty value alone we would keep the vehicle driveable as long as possible.

Work began removing seats, handrails etc. from inside, the seat frames already being destined for another of our projects. Much of the glass was not useable as it was severely etched, but we saved what we could. The interior lights were also required for a project so they were carefully removed.

As none of the roof was required we decided to remove it in 3 pieces, so the rear pillars were cut, and the roof was cut to separate the rear part. Using the fork lift it was soon removed. Next a cut was made across the roof to separate the front. Rather than cutting all the pillars holding the centre section of roof, we decided to just lift with the fork lift, and the roof section came away easily. Using the fork lift again, the front section didn't take long to remove. We now had an open topper.

The upper deck floor was now removed, after which we decided to remove the centre section of the upper deck. This was released partly by cutting, and partly by skilled use of the fork lift. It looked quite brutal, but it was the quickest way.

To be continued!

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