Posted by Dale Tringham on April 8, 2001, 9:22 pm
62.64.191.187
In thanks for the help recently received I thought I'd just post my thoughts on my recent trip to N.I - verbatim as reported to the uk-bus-fleetnews group......................
By pure coincidence I went to Belfast for 3 days on Tuesday to find that their first new double deckers for 25 years entered service only the previous day!. For those not too clear on the Northern Ireland operations, the original Belfast Corporation is now, effectively, Citybus whereas the country area is, and always has been, Ulsterbus. The main difference in recent times has been that both operators have now been joined in with the Northern Ireland Railways under the umbrella company 'Translink'. As such all recent vehicles are now painted in Translink livery - with red added for Belfast operations.
The new double deckers for Citybus are 2921-2/6-8 (HCZ 9921 etc) - Volvo B7TL/Ar H49/27F (photos will be on uk-bus-photo next week). I understand that the missing 3 have been returned for some further work to be rectified. A driver indicated that 24 were due in total. At present, the 5 in service are allocated to the 83/84 service from the city centre to Four Winds although on Wednesday one escaped on to a journey on route 49 up the Antrim Road to Ballyduff. These are, of course, to be seen side by side with the last sizeable group of Bristol RE's still in operation anywhere in the UK - the XOI batch from 1982 were the oldest seen but the following batches of RE's with AXI and BXI registrations were also much in evidence (probably nearly 100 still in stock).
In the Ulsterbus fleet a small batch of Scania's with Wright bodywork have also entered service with 701-6 (HCZ 8701 etc) noted on routes 8 and 13.
I will post other events as a separate item but suffice to say that I'd recommend anyone to go to Belfast and Northern Ireland generally. My flight was only £29 ('Go' from Stansted) and, contrary to what I found when I last visited 21 years ago, there really were virtually no signs of the 'troubles' [only really extra protection for police stations].