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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.
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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.
History
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 The Sydney exhibit was the last trailer bus used in NSW, withdrawn in 1977.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.
A large order for 1175 buses from the Netherlands Railways for buses from Crossley included an order for 250 trailer buses, each to carry 52 seated and 28 standing passengers. The tractor units were delivered as short Crossley DD42s, and these were matched in the Netherlands with DAF built trailer chassis fitted with bus bodies.
In the late 1980s, a Mexican-built trailer bus was in test service in the Los Angeles / Orange County area of California.
Obsolescence
As early as the mid-1940s, trailer buses began to quickly fall out of favour for a variety of factors:
Trailer buses saw service until at least 1984 in South Africa, possibly due to the rugged terrain in its remote areas, and the availability of specialist bus builders as opposed to truck dealers and basic body builders.
Trailer buses are still in service in Cuba, where they were introduced under the nickname of "camellos" ("camels", from the twin-humped shape of the trailers) during the so-called "Special Period" after the fall of the Soviet Union. As of 2008, the trailer buses are reportedly being gradually retired from service in Havana city, replaced by Chinese-made buses.