Editor’s note: This op-ed for Bus & Motorcoach News is written by Doug Woodie, General Manager of UMA Member Cross Country Tours Inc.
Having spent over four decades in the bus and motorcoach industry, recently I began to think about all the various coach makes and models I had come into contact with and what made each one stand out, whether good or bad.
Most of my years have been spent on the technical and repair side of the business, or maintenance management. Some of the first operators I worked for still had General Motor coaches in their fleet. These were rugged, well-thought-out designs that had proven themselves over several millions of miles. The same reliability was shared by most, if not all, North American over-the-road manufacturers. To me, these earlier models stood out because of ease of access to most, if not all, of their major components.
I am managing a successful family-owned motorcoach company in the Southeast. Its success is due in part to picking one model coach and operating it for most of its lifespan. For us, that means two decades. During that time, almost every component will have to be repaired or replaced.
One of the biggest frustrations operators have when road failures occur is finding someone willing to attempt to make any type of repair. More times than I can count, when we have had a coach down and there were no other coach companies nearby, truck repair facilities absolutely refused to touch a bus. Some of them claimed their insurance didn’t cover repair of passenger vehicles, which is basically nonsense.
Repairs have become physically difficult
The real truth, in my opinion, is that access to most if not all of the critical components require the flexibility of a 4-foot, 100-pound contortionist. I can’t really blame the repair facility for refusing my pleading repair request, because if I didn’t have to, I wouldn’t do it either.
Which leads us to the meat of my thought process concerning coach component placement.
Two recent major issues clearly reminded me that maybe some OEMs have gotten away from the built-in redundancy we operators had become accustomed to.
The first is the charging system. For years I remember working through a tiny hole in the floor to change out very large and heavy Delco 50 DN alternators. My back still hates me for making it perform this task. So in the early 1990s when I began to see new offerings from European manufacturers consisting of two independent alternators (Bosch T1s) that were reliable and extremely lightweight, I knew the days of the old 50 DN were numbered.
The true beauty of the two independent alternators (running off of separate belts) was the fact that one of them would actually run the whole coach. So if one went down, the other one would get it home.
So what is the problem?
It’s that even though we still have two independent alternators, the powers that be have decided that both of them need to operate with just one belt. What sense does this make? Some, if not most, are now driving the water pump with the same belt with constant tension. I have replaced more water pumps the last few years than I ever did when they were simply gear-driven internally.
I already know what the canned answer from the coach manufacturer will be. They are going to point the finger at the engine supplier that configures this particular arrangement.
The problem I had recently with the charging system was when a coach in Washington, D.C., (on a Friday night, of course) experienced transmission shifting issues due to an over-voltage situation. I learned this because of the codes retrieved from the shift pad by the driver.
The only thing I have ever seen cause this issue is a faulty alternator. Luckily, this was an older coach that still had both alternators separate. I had the driver remove the belt of the alternator I suspected to be the issue and the coach became whole again. It finished the next two days of touring and made the 500-mile trek back home with just one alternator. If this had been one of our newer coaches with the single belt drive setup, it would have been a coach-down situation. Did I mention the fact that this was a Friday night in October in D.C.?
More poor design
The second issue that occurred concerns the cooling system. If you have been an operator for more than 10 minutes, you are probably aware that there are more coolant hoses and twice as many clamps than you care to try to count. My issue occurred in the middle of the night with a coach traveling down I-95 on its way to West Palm Beach, Florida. A leak occurred in the heating compartment where the auxiliary heater is located.
Of course, the driver was nose to the windshield in the left lane when suddenly a red light appeared on the dash, and within less than a minute the driver had coast to the right side of the road. And what side of the coach is this compartment located? You guessed it, the highway side, with oncoming traffic barreling by.
On previous models, this particular coolant leak wouldn’t have been such a major issue because the manufacturer used to provide us with quadrant manual isolating (lever) valves. If a coolant leak occurred in the front of the coach, you just simply closed a valve handle and isolated that area from getting any additional coolant, and the engine remained happy with enough coolant required to keep itself running.
Now, the current newer models have only two valves that are in ridiculous areas. One of them requires you to reach over the steaming hot auxiliary heater and feel around for it. Forget about seeing it. They decided to put the second valve under a floor panel inside the coach aisle, and trying to remove this panel is a task upon itself. What sense does this make? What makes me even more irritated is that the other OEMs have done basically the same thing. If there are isolating valves, they require hide-and-seek ninja skills to locate and reach them.
Hard to keep buses on the road
The name of the game in my business is fleet utilization. Unfortunately, it is impossible to utilize a coach sitting on the side of the highway because a 50-cent hose clamp breaks and the driver can’t find or cut off the valve that is no longer supplied.
The coach of the future that I imagine would practically sell itself. Considering that the cost of purchasing a new coach from all the current North American offerings is relatively the same, the most user–friendly, ease-of-maintenance coach wins. I believe such a coach would be worth paying a higher price. It also might actually retain some resale value, which is something not often spoken of or realized anymore.
There definitely needs to be more dialogue and discussion concerning these matters, so hopefully some of my rambling thoughts can be the spark.
Doug Woodie is the General Manager of Cross Country Tours Inc., in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
