Trailer bus

A trailer bus or articulated trailer bus is a bus formed out of a bus bodied semi-trailer pulled by a conventional tractor unit in the same way as a conventional articulated semi-trailer truck.

Trailer buses are usually pulled by a conventional truck from various truck manufacturers, while others have larger space cabs. Trailer bus bodies are built by various local builders.

An early trailer bus was designed in Amsterdam in the 1920s as bus designs got longer. As a solution to possible grounding hazards on humped bridges, three prototypes were built in 1924, but proved to be problematic, and later converted to rigid bodies in 1927.

During World War II and in the immediate post-war years, trailer buses were turned to as a simple and economical way of providing bus transport to replace worn out conventional bus fleets. The semi-trailers were basic and uncomfortable, but each could carry more passengers than an ordinary single-decker bus, and nearly as many as a double-decker bus. Indeed at least one double-decker trailer bus was known to have been built for service in Mumbai, India.

In Australia, 123 semi-trailer type buses were built between 1939 and 1984; one example, a 1947 semi-trailer coupled with an American-built 1943 White M3A1 tractor, is now located in Sydney Bus Museum in Sydney, New South Wales. The Sydney exhibit was the last trailer bus used in NSW, withdrawn in 1977.

Trailer buses were also used in Perth, Western Australia, from 1952 onwards, purchased by Western Australian Government Railways, with the trailer bodies built by Scarborough Bus Services.

In 1948, ten British-built trailer buses saw service as a staff canteens for London Transport (in country green livery) with one passing to the Cobham Bus Museum in 1972.

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Wikipedia