It'll never catch on....
...and it didn't. According to WikiWhoKnowsAlmost Everything, Sentinel Waggon Works Ltd only ever built four steam-powered buses. Quite why they even did that in the mid-1920s is a bit of a mystery as oil-based internal combustion engines were already well established and clearly the way forward.
The above photo shows Sentinel DG4 No.8714, built at the Sentinel Works in Shrewsbury in 1932 as a flat back steam lorry. In 2002, with no original buses still in existence, new owners undertook considerable research using works photographs to recreate an authentic looking bus body on top of the DG4 chassis, which is what those four buses actually built also used.
On completion, the bus ran a short-lived tourist service in the Lake District some ten years ago. Still fully roadworthy, she now consumes about 50 gallons of water and 110lb of coal for every 10 miles travelled. No wonder it never caught on.
It'll never catch on....
...and it didn't. According to WikiWhoKnowsAlmost Everything, Sentinel Waggon Works Ltd only ever built four steam-powered buses. Quite why they even did that in the mid-1920s is a bit of a mystery as oil-based internal combustion engines were already well established and clearly the way forward.
The above photo shows Sentinel DG4 No.8714, built at the Sentinel Works in Shrewsbury in 1932 as a flat back steam lorry. In 2002, with no original buses still in existence, new owners undertook considerable research using works photographs to recreate an authentic looking bus body on top of the DG4 chassis, which is what those four buses actually built also used.
On completion, the bus ran a short-lived tourist service in the Lake District some ten years ago. Still fully roadworthy, she now consumes about 50 gallons of water and 110lb of coal for every 10 miles travelled. No wonder it never caught on.