Hunting a Pelican

Reading Time: 10 minutes

I know, it’s an obtuse title for today as I head on a CrossCountry train to Southampton Central and hopefully on to the Isle of Wight to chase down the test bus. We are indeed all going on a Yutong hunt, and it should be a big one with two decks and thankfully when it comes to travelling on a Red Jet; I am not scared.

It was a question as to whether I would be spending my Friday heading over the water as I had noticed that Southern Vectis’s temporary EV1 had spent a few days recuperating in the depot and not been out in service. Roll on 0730 today and it appeared on one of the three electric earmarked routes, service 1 between Newport and Cowes.

The Yutong

The Yutong U11DD demonstrators have been about a bit and I had hoped that I would catch up with it in Cardiff when it spent a spell there. This particular demonstrator has also been to Reading and Derby among others, where at the former I did indeed manage to get a rubbish shot at a distance as I was not even aware it was there.

It was so bad though that I must have immediately deleted it as I can’t find it.

The buses are being demonstrated by Pelican Bus & Coach for a while to come yet and there has been online promotion from the dealer for around the last 12 months as the bus made it’s way to the UK, if I recall on a slow boat from China.

BUT First a Bus on the mainland

I remember when the Quay Connect bus service was financially supported and a completely free service between Southampton Central Station and Town Quay. Today though it is only free if you have a Red Funnel ferry ticket already, and I don’t, so £2 later I am on the dedicated Bluestar 1233 which is still a great service.

If you are travelling to the Isle of Wight and will be buying your ticket at the terminal, the staff will deduct £2 from your ferry fare if you present your QuayConnect ticket!

It’s an Hourly Round Trip

So I am no expert on Southern Vectis timetables, but the bus tracking means that it is clear that I am going to miss the 1050 departure to Newport; because I am on the 1050 Red Jet arrival.

I definitely do not do running. I would rather find a pub and have a pint on the basis that Red Jet 7 had no working toilets and so I ended up in The Fountain just outside the Cowes RedJet terminal. It’s okay, but was a little dark inside. It did give me a little time to check up on the previous weeks workings and work out that in theory the next working from Cowes for EV1 was 1150.

So I took a wander. I went up Park Road in the hope of getting some shots other than at a terminal or a bus station and picked up a few examples of the incumbent vehicles touting for trade along the way.

Except that was all that was coming. EV1 appeared to be parked in the layover bays at Newport Bus Station, at least if BusTimes was to be believed, and so I carried on up Park Road to the next bus stop to find that I should have been heading down Victoria Road instead….

Newport Bus Station

So I finally caught up with the Yutong U11DD in Newport Bus Station when it was indeed laying over out of service in the centre of the bus station. I wandered around for a bit, trying to find a place to take a shot without getting in the way of the large number of people using the bus station for it’s intended purpose.

For those that are not familiar with the Newport Bus Station it is a really tight and compact working area and over the years that I have found need to be there, it has always been busy, and any reversing movements always accompanied by staff acting as a banksman. There is almost always something green either arriving or departing from the bus station and drivers taking tentative tight turns; I am genuinely impressed at how Newport Bus Station manages to be such a busy small hub .

To be honest, this was how I was expecting my day to end and made a presumption that for whatever reason EV1 had been pulled for a few hours whether it be because of driver familiarisation (or lack of) or even a technical fault. It almost felt a conspiracy that as I arrived on the Island that the U11DD was going out of service until a small group of drivers and staff appeared and boarded.

I did honestly think at this point that it looked like there was some internal familiarisation and / or promotional bits going on, so I tried to find somewhere where they might take it for a spin. The answer was simple, it was going for a spin around the bus station until it appeared on a stand.

I was in luck that I had not gone to find something to eat and that it looked like a trip to Ryde was on the cards. If you cast minds back to last week, you may remember me saying that the funding for electric buses on the Isle of Wight was to use a successful ZEBRA (Zero Emissions Bus Regional Area) funding to upgrade the buses on services 1 (West Cowes), 5 (East Cowes) and 9 (Newport).

There was an issue with the Ticketer system that had been fitted to the bus and after a little tinkering and I suspect from what I was seeing a little bit of ETM “turn it off and on again” it was run without taking fares.

Outbound & Upstairs

My plan was quite simple. I would do a full trip upstairs and a full trip downstairs. I knew the services would be busy, but I was hoping to get more on-board pictures than I managed because I prefer to get fewer fellow passengers in shots. You may already notice that when I upload photos to either here, or to the new Flickr page, I take the time to blur out as many faces (both drivers and passengers) as I feel are identifiable. I appreciate that people do not always like to have their faces posted everywhere.

So I was impressed with some of the elements of the upstairs ride and others I think were down to the fact it was a demonstrator that drivers have not had long to get used to. As you can see on the demonstrator, USB points at every seat (which worked, unlike on Red Jet 7) nice large stop buttons for the bell and despite being fitted with air conditioning there are also small hopper windows.

I wonder if there is a benefit for these smaller hopper windows or whether it was simply a case of “what do we already use and have in stock” because certainly when I have taken the time to notice, the opening hoppers on most buses are a full sized units rather than what you see here. Maybe I just have not noticed well enough (?)

Taking a perch right at the very back of the bus I can only assume that a few strings of batteries are stored right at the back of the bus because there is a sizable back shelf upstairs. The back row of seats were comfortable enough for the job, although I would probably have a bit of numbness if I was to do all three hours of the Island Coaster on it.

So as I mentioned I think that some elements need to be taken with a pinch of demonstrator salt. I felt the parking brake release was occasionally a bit of a jolt when pulling away, which I put down to the fact that the drivers have only had this bus for a week to 10 days; I imagine each different drivetrain has a different characteristic. The on-board next-stop announcements were also not working, which could have been simply because it has not been programmed for it’s short spell, or it’s integration with the Ticketer ETM, or something.

The core of the passenger experience actually was quite good though. It felt reasonably smooth, I did not feel as rattled as I was in the back of a Wrightbus Electroliner on the M275.

Ryde Interchange

I have not been to Ryde since the bus station closed down and the new Ryde Interchange opened. So while I hoped that EV1 was doing the next trip in the circuit, I spent 90 minutes around the Interchange area having a pint and seeing what was about:

I was quite lucky to get the Island Line class 484 coming out of St Johns Tunnel as a unit fault had suspended the service for a while and this was the first train resuming the service. I do wonder if we will get to a point where the class 484 (converted D stock units) are considered too much of a liability and a new procurement process is announced… surprised Bob Seely MP is not already demanding heads in this election year!

Okay, so it may be a January election; so not quite a definite election year.

Anyway, I think that the aesthetics of the new interchange are much better than the old bus station. Of course, there are a number of benefits to the drivers such as eliminating the need to reverse out of bays on a busy summers day, and there seems to be much more room for pedestrians and those loitering for their bus to arrive.

A wander up the hill that is Union Street was on the cards to again try and get pictures of buses anywhere other than a terminus, but EV1 was faster than it’s tracker and as I got a heads up it was coming (albeit 15 minutes late) it was already passing me and unloading outside the Wetherspoons… not the best place to try and get it.

Inbound and Downstairs

Sorry – it was far too busy for me to want to grab interior shots of the downstairs. Doing the end to end trip there though gave some insight as to why the Yutong U11DD might not be the ideal EV for the Isle of Wight. For the first reason, I would suggest that you click through to this article from RouteOne and their first look at the U11DD, and then specifically to this image from the downstairs saloon.

Now they have had access to the other demonstrator, which at the time of writing was with Diamond Bus in Birmingham. So the interior is in the grey and silver rather than the red that Southern Vectis are using. The principle is the same though and I think that for the number of older and infirm people that seem to travel on buses on the Island they going to struggle to get on.

Indeed a number of people, both Concessionary Pass Holders and otherwise, struggled to step up into the seats which I can only assume are over another string of batteries. At some stops as people got out of the pair of low level seats, others were quickly shuffling around to grab them.

Something which I didn’t note above when I was travelling upstairs was that there was not an obvious “Bus Stopping” sign in the upper saloon. Now I did make an assumption that this was meant to be integrated into the next-stop digital signage that was not working; but I must admit that I did not like the alternative downstairs:

I found the matching screens by the buggy bay and on the front bulkhead next to the driver to be fairly dim and easy to miss. A simple fixed case which lights up to me works better, unless the plan would be for Southern Vectis to actually forego these and fit screens similar to other vehicles in the Go South Coast fleet. With the Ticketer machine now working though, I still could not hear any next-stop announcements, so I will make a presumption that they were not in use at all.

Looking through to the driving cab of the bus, I could see the screens for wing mirror cameras on the left hand side. Even from two-thirds of the way down the bus I could see plenty of detail from the camera and the pictures from my vantage point looked very high quality. From talking to bus drivers at other operators that already use them, the system can take some getting used to.

Catching a chance conversation on the bus though, it seems that nothing will beat the Scania Omnicity vehicles that these are likely to replace. Indeed with the 20 or so vehicles that the Zero-Emissions Bus Regional Area funding is paying for will probably not have all of the features that Pelican Bus and Coach have stuffed onto these vehicles to show off. If Southern Vectis do opt for the Yutong – I am not sure that they should – then we may or may not see the CCTV mirrors, or even the downstairs layout.

A Volvo is coming too….

From the Southern Vectis news piece about the electric bus trials, they say there are plans for a Volvo to be heading to the Island at the end of June. With little further detail to the announcement, I can only assume it might be the Volvo BZL DD that has been floating around operators and is currently with Lothian Buses.

Hopefully Southern Vectis will offer a few more details in due course so I do not have to keep checking with the Bus Times vehicle list. I will say though that the Yutong is a nice bus but I question whether it is the right layout, at least in the demonstrator on the Island.