Ancillary Fleet Addition
Things are afoot in the Robertson Buses ancillary fleet, with some new stuff and some renumbered stuff. Arriving soon(ish) should be a new recovery truck, but already here is this Nissan Cabstar cherry picker platform truck. As trucks go it’s pretty tiny and barely bigger than the Peugeot staff car – even one of the small buses dwarfs it.
The platform truck can be used for a variety of purposes, such as allowing easier access to bus stop flags to update the stickers, up to the roof level of double deckers for cleaning and repairs, changing adverts, changing light bulbs (!) and retrieving a lost basketball that somehow ended up on the depot roof. And, of course, as is RB custom at this point, it gets used to visit the chip shop (I think the drivers have the ambition to visit the local chippy in every member of the fleet).
Renumbering of the ancillary fleet actually splits it off specifically as the ancillary fleet, as opposed to being lumped in with the rest of the bus fleet. So ancillary vehicles now have an ‘S’ prefix, though for most of them that’s merely an admin exercise and their original numbers are still displayed.
S1 is the Peugeot 206 staff transfer car, which previously did not have a fleet number
S2 will be the new recovery truck
S3 is the withdrawn Dennis Dart which is now laid up at Grantham as a mess room for the drivers
S4 is the Plaxton Beaver used as a van, which still carries the number 4 without the prefix
S5 is the Nissan Cabstar platform truck shown above
S10 is the Leyland Roadtrain which still carries 10 on its sides with no prefix
The S itself doesn’t particularly stand for anything; it could be Service, Supplementary, Secondary, Support, Sausages. Even though it’s called the ancillary fleet I didn’t feel like an A prefix because then everything would sound like a piece of paper, or a main road.
Ancillary Fleet Addition
Things are afoot in the Robertson Buses ancillary fleet, with some new stuff and some renumbered stuff. Arriving soon(ish) should be a new recovery truck, but already here is this Nissan Cabstar cherry picker platform truck. As trucks go it’s pretty tiny and barely bigger than the Peugeot staff car – even one of the small buses dwarfs it.
The platform truck can be used for a variety of purposes, such as allowing easier access to bus stop flags to update the stickers, up to the roof level of double deckers for cleaning and repairs, changing adverts, changing light bulbs (!) and retrieving a lost basketball that somehow ended up on the depot roof. And, of course, as is RB custom at this point, it gets used to visit the chip shop (I think the drivers have the ambition to visit the local chippy in every member of the fleet).
Renumbering of the ancillary fleet actually splits it off specifically as the ancillary fleet, as opposed to being lumped in with the rest of the bus fleet. So ancillary vehicles now have an ‘S’ prefix, though for most of them that’s merely an admin exercise and their original numbers are still displayed.
S1 is the Peugeot 206 staff transfer car, which previously did not have a fleet number
S2 will be the new recovery truck
S3 is the withdrawn Dennis Dart which is now laid up at Grantham as a mess room for the drivers
S4 is the Plaxton Beaver used as a van, which still carries the number 4 without the prefix
S5 is the Nissan Cabstar platform truck shown above
S10 is the Leyland Roadtrain which still carries 10 on its sides with no prefix
The S itself doesn’t particularly stand for anything; it could be Service, Supplementary, Secondary, Support, Sausages. Even though it’s called the ancillary fleet I didn’t feel like an A prefix because then everything would sound like a piece of paper, or a main road.