One and a half decker

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A one-and-a-half-decker from Franz Brozincevic & Cie., Wetzikon with Vetter superstructure, built in 1966
Later a one-and-a-half-decker on a Daimler-Benz chassis with a VÖV standard bus front
One-man car in side profile
Büssing one-and-a-half-decker from 1965 from Braunschweig in restored condition, it is considered to be the oldest originally preserved one-and-a-half-decker in Germany, 2015

A one and a half decker , also called a one and a half decker , is an omnibus or trolleybus , the rear half of which is designed as a double decker bus .

history

The shape of the one-and-a-half-decker was developed in 1949 by the Essen-based car body construction company Gebr. Ludewig . At first, touring buses were manufactured according to this principle, in 1955 the first one-and-a-half-decker city bus was created in cooperation with the Duisburg transport company . After the bankruptcy of the Ludewig brothers, which had produced more than 800 one-and-a-half-deckers by then, the Fellbacher Karosseriefabrik Vetter continued production until 1988. However, Vetter had previously produced individual one-and-a-half-deckers with the permission of Ludewig. The reason for this was a temporary overload of the Ludewig factory, otherwise only Ludewig himself owned the corresponding patent for this type of car.

A single piece was produced again in 1995 on the basis of old plans and based on the type Mercedes-Benz O 408 for the Baden-Württemberg bus company Anton Schuster from Durlangen . This car was still in use on scheduled services around Schwäbisch Gmünd into the 2010s .

The body was mainly built on chassis from Büssing (later MAN ) and Daimler-Benz , while early examples were built on chassis from Krupp , Faun and Henschel . For static reasons, chassis with a rear trailing axle were used.

One advantage over a real double-decker bus was the lower overall height, so more underpasses could be passed. The design enabled a lowered boarding platform at the rear with a double-wide entry door ( low-floor entry ) and a fixed conductor's seat to the right. After a quick step onto the large standing platform and passenger handling by the conductor during the journey, short passenger switching times were possible. The passengers could then distribute themselves in the car, a mostly double-wide middle door and, in the first cars, a single-wide front door next to the driver were available for getting out.

The passenger flow was reversed for the conductorless one-man operation introduced in the 1960s . The front overhang was lengthened to accommodate a double-width door for two-lane entry. The lowered rear platform no longer offered the advantage of a low entrance - more seats were built on it - instead, three steps had to be overcome when entering the front because of the high floor above the underfloor motor .

After the introduction of the VÖV standard bus , standardized components (windshield, windows, doors, central electrical compartment, driver's workstation) were used for the one-and-a-half-decker bus in order to benefit from the advantages of standardization in the companies.

One-and-a-half-deckers were particularly common in regular service from the late 1950s to the 1970s. When used with a conductor at the time, they had the advantage of a large capacity on a relatively small traffic area. The one-and-a-half-decker became particularly important after the ban on transporting people in bus trailers that came into force in 1960 . From the late 1960s, the one-and-a-half-decker was increasingly being replaced by articulated buses . With the same number of seats, these offered more standing space and, due to larger series, were also cheaper to buy. Most of the one-and-a-half-deckers still in existence in the late 1970s and 1980s were last used by schoolchildren . Today only a few vehicles of this type have survived.

Trolleybuses

A one and a half decker trolleybus on a Henschel chassis in Aachen, 1962

The 29 trolleybuses from the manufacturers Ludewig (25 pieces) and Vetter (four pieces) were a special form of the one-and-a-half-decker, they were produced for four German cities from 1956:

The Aachen car was the only one to be preserved in a museum; it has been in the English Trolleybus Museum Sandtoft since 1972 .

Coaches

A GM Scenicruiser built in 1954

In the touring coach sector, there were concepts that, especially from the outside, showed similarities with the one and a half decker buses . However, some of them were designed as a high-decker instead of a double-decker and therefore had an underfloor luggage room instead of a basement. Accordingly, these step high-deckers , which were not very common in the German-speaking area, are not real one-and-a-half deckers.

In Spain, the manufacturer Pegaso developed such a vehicle from 1949 with the Z-403 Monocasco, which was supposed to offer passengers a better view in the rear due to the height offset.

In the USA, General Motors delivered around 1,000 PD-4501 Scenicruiser vehicles with two different storey heights to Greyhound between 1954 and 1956 . In the series built by GM between 1966 and 1980, the so-called Buffalo buses , the offset was shifted significantly forwards and was located directly behind the driver's workplace, so that they were visually closer to modern high-deckers than to one-and-a-half-deckers.

The German manufacturer Kässbohrer also presented such a touring coach with the Setra S 150 P in 1967. The P in the type designation stands for panorama and indicates the design as a step high-decker. Only two vehicles of this type were produced, which were delivered to customers in Switzerland and Austria.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Information on the restoration of the Büssing one-and-a-half-decker from 1965
  2. ↑ Information on the Büssing one and a half decker from 1965 with many old photos
  3. ↑ Processing of the only surviving one-and-a-half-decker , report by K. Budach on trolleymotion.eu, accessed on July 17, 2017 ( memento of the original from August 25, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.trolleymotion.eu
  4. ↑ Stuttgart Rail & Bus Pages by Martin Rimmele
  5. ↑ a b Kässbohrer S 150 P - A rare treasure on tour (PDF) on busmagazin.de