Buses

Buses might be the poor cousin of Melbourne public transport, but I still write about them.

Melbourne public transport as crew cab utes

You’ve seen Melbourne public transport as Arnott’s Shapes, but how about as crew cab utes? You have Metro Trains Melbourne in blue. Yarra Trams in green. V/Line in purple. And buses in orange. I cheated on the last one because it’s a van, and it’s operated by outdoor advertising company oOh!Media, who have the contract […]

Yet another Google Image Search OCR adventure

A few years ago I discovered that Google Image Search applies OCR to indexed images, enabling it to return results for text that have never appeared online, and I’ve found more examples over the years since. Well, now I’ve found yet another! Who’s that bus? Back in 2023 I photographed a Transit Systems coach, with […]

‘Made in Melbourne for Melbourne’ buses

In recent years ‘Made in Melbourne for Melbourne’ signs have started appearing on buses operating around Melbourne, but in reality that claim is a little stretched – we build the bus bodies locally atop an imported bus chassis. The process starts with a bus chassis – a bare steel frame with diesel engine and mechanical […]

Farewell to Melbourne’s first electric bus

This is the story of Melbourne’s first electric bus, which doesn’t even operate in Victoria any more. The story starts in 2019, when Melbourne-based bus body builder Volgren was building a prototype electric bus on an imported BYD K9 chassis. In July 2019 Volgren completed the prototype of its first ever pure-electric bus, a product […]

A new life for a retired PTV bus

The other night out in St Kilda I saw an interesting looking bus – painted all black with a massive ‘Addikted To Ink’ logo on the side, it looked like one of the buses that Transdev Melbourne used to operate in Melbourne. But was it? Looking up the company name, I found the bus featured […]