Homeless in Vancouver: A dead transit bus gets a lift back to the barn
On Thursday (April 28) at about 6:45 p.m., I noticed a transit bus, unlit and with its trolley poles stowed horizontally.
It was parked in the westbound lane of the 1400 block of West Broadway.
The passengers and driver had long since disembarked and the only person that I could see moving in and around the darkened bus was the driver-operator of a heavy-duty yellow and blue tow truck, which was sitting at an angle to the nose of the frozen New Flyer.
It took perhaps 15 minutes to get everything hooked up and ready to go. One of the last steps involved sticking a working set of red signal lights onto the back of the electrically inert trolley. Then the show was on the road.
The Unitow truck, bus in tow, turned south off West Broadway onto Granville Street.
My guess was that the pair were headed to the Coast Mountain Bus Company Vancouver Transit Centre, located after the end of Granville, on 9141 Hudson Street, down by the Fraser River.
It takes more than a run-of-the-mill tow truck to pull a transit bus. According to the Coast Mountain Bus Company’s fleet specs, the New Flyer Standard Low-Floor Trolley, completely empty, weighs in at all of 14.19 tonnes.
The truck that Unitow used to haul it away was a mighty Western Star Tandem Axle Wrecker; a 35-ton monster, designed for just such loads, with 18 speeds and 600 horsepower at its disposal.
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