Good old 2105

(Photo by BobbaLew)

During 16&1/2 years of driving bus for Regional Transit Service in Rochester, NY, my funnest ride ever was 2105 — so fun I even took a picture of it (above).
And that was despite it not going up to Lake Ontario.
I used to say the best movie-screen of all was the windshield of a bus going out to Island Cottage.
Island Cottage was a few miles west of the Lake Ave. loop, so essentially you were driving along the southern lake shore.
Incredible weather came in off the lake; snow squalls and winds and crashing waves.
Ya never saw that inland; only up along the lake.
2105 was my first adventure with articulated buses — articulated meaning bendable.
It was shortly after we got them.
We’d had training, but training is only an approximation of the real world.
Our first artics were M.A.N., a German design.
They were built under license, here in America; I think S. Carolina.
It was our first application in line-service.
An artic was 60 feet long, but could turn quite sharply because it had a hinge in the middle.
I remember swinging that thing into the opposite lane at my first tight corner. I’d need a HUGE swing to get 60 feet around that corner.
Didn’t need to. It had that hinge in the middle. It could turn quite tightly.
The back part (“trailer”) was hinged by a draw bar with a bellows.
You could walk the entire length of the bus.
A passenger could get on in the front part, pay their fare, and then hike back to the trailer to sit down.
In fact, you could even sit over the hinge. There were two passenger seats on the circular turntable in the floor.
The trailer was on its own set of wheels, and they steered.
You had be careful doing sharp right turns. You had to have an empty adjacent lane, otherwise the trailer would step out and bop whoever was next to you.
I saw it happen once. Neither the bus-driver nor the four-wheeler knew.
The motor was in the front part, slung under the floor.
The motor weight wasn’t over the drive-wheels like a regular bus. You could get stuck.
They were slow; slow to accelerate. So slow ya had to start accelerating well before a traffic-light changed.
If ya were three cars back, ya wouldn’t make the light — take-up was that slow.
So driving one was a challenge. Ya had to drive around it some.
2105 was a combination of two earlier single-bus Park-and-Rides; one to East Rochester, and one to Fairport.
It was implementation of the whole reason we got artics; two busloads with only one driver.
I was hitting both Fairport and East Rochester.
But it meant schedule dickering; earlier from Fairport, and later through East Rochester.
Yet in effect I was carrying less total passengers than the two previous individual Park-and-Rides. Plus my ridership kept decreasing over the six months I drove it.
I ended up usually carrying 36 or so.
A regular bus could carry that many — those two Park-and-Rides were carrying over 60.
And it was a great clientele; mostly all suburban regulars.
Stiffs that worked downtown, and took my bus because I was pretty regular.
I was gettin’ them people to work on time no matter what the weather.
If it looked like the expressway downtown was plugged, I’d get off and use secret detours.
It was a reflection that I’d once rode bus myself.
And if there was anything I hated as a passenger it was delay.
My passengers loved it. “We got a good one,” they’d tell me.
2105 also paid better than anything; that is, time on the road per paycheck.
Both halves comprised seven hours five minutes, yet I was guaranteed eight.
2105 was the first half.
And the run had the longest “spread;” out at 6 or so in the morning, done at 7:30 p.m.
My break was almost six hours — I was covering rush hours.
2105 was about two hours, only one trip. My second half was about five.
The “spread” was recompense for that long break; overtime rate past 4 p.m. — three and a half hours.
But I could have only done it living in Rochester, five minutes from the bus-barns.
When we moved to West Bloomfield, breaks like that were no longer possible. I was 40 minutes from the barns.
And 2105 couldn’t last forever.
My second half got hooked up with a school-trip instead of 2105, so I switched to that.
I told my 2105 passengers I was leaving; they gave me a party of sorts.

• For 16&1/2 years (1977-1993) I drove transit bus for Regional Transit Service, the transit-bus operator in Rochester, NY. My stroke October 26, 1993 ended that.
• The bus-route from downtown Rochester to Lake Ontario is out Lake Ave. Island Cottage was a bus-route extension west. Rochester is not on Lake Ontario, but near it.
• The bus-route to East Rochester and Fairport is the 2100 line; hence 2105.
• “East Rochester” is an old suburb east of Rochester, once the location of New York Central Railroad’s car-shops (where freightcars were constructed and repaired). The car-shops are gone. East Rochester is on the mainline of the old New York Central — now CSX. —Fairport is an old suburb even farther east, but on the old Erie Canal. The railroad also passes through it.
• “Four-wheeler” is car-driver.
• A bus-run is comprised of segments, called “halves.” One could be much shorter than the other. There also was the possibility of a bus-run with three halves. (REPUBLICAN MATH ALERT!)
• The buses were stored inside in large “barns.” The Barns were also the location of bus dispatch.
• We live in the small rural town of West Bloomfield in Western NY, southeast of Rochester.
• RE: “School-trip.....” —Regional Transit also provides bus-service to schools, but in regular city buses.