A wrecked suburban Chicago PACE bus at the garage in Melrose Park, IL. No idea how or where this happened though!
Category Photography / Still Life
Species Unspecified / Any
Size 1280 x 960px
File Size 192.3 kB
It looks like an Orion 6 (mid 1990s design). They were designed with 100% low floors but for the newer model, the Orion 7, It`s just low at the front with a high floor at the rear, better design too doing it that way as well since fewer seats have to be taken away for the wheel wells. The company was created near my home of Toronto, Canada, but the buses are also partly made in New York state to appeal to American transit operators as well. :) Here in Toronto we are now getting some of the Orion 7 next generation regular diesiel buses, and will probably stay away from buying more hybrids given how much trouble the batteries have failed over recent times. Nice photo too. :)
Yep, it's an Orion VI. If you want to see a transit agency with a bunch of rare, weird old busses, it's Pace. They're at the bottom of the RTA funding structure (CTA, Chicago's rapid transit and buses, is at the top; Metra, the commuter train system, is #2, and Pace, the suburban bus network, is 3rd) so they have the least money for new buses and maintenance. These days, they have Orion I's, Orion VIs, low-floor NABIs in 35 and 40 feet, plus some NOVA Classics and one or two Ikarus 40-footers. They also have several MCI highway coaches for suburban express routes. Federal recovery money has paid for new 30-foot low floors from El Dorado, with some weird 30' hybrids on the way.
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