On 4/25/05, David Mann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > There are electric buses just like these in Wellington. The great > thing about them is that they're quiet. That's a real bonus as diesel > buses can keep you awake if you're staying in the central city. The > pickup thing sometimes jumps off the cables and the driver has to get > out and restore the connection (I've never seen that happen though).
When I was a kid, Halifax, Nova Scotia (I never lived there, but we went often to visit grandparents) had trolleys (which is what they called the electroc buses). I recall several times being in the trolley when the pickup jumped off the cables, and as you described, the driver had to exit the vehicle to put them back on. Seemed to happen more often going around corners. They also had trolleys when we moved to Kitchener, Ontario back in '68. Both Halifax and Kitchener took the electic trolleys out of service by the early '70's. There was a lot of pressure for Toronto to do the same thing with their streetcars at that time, when the rolling stock was getting old, and huge capital expenditures were needed to update the system. Thankfully the civic officials were far-sighted enough to inject the needed cash, get newly designed cars (designed specifically for Toronto) and keep the system going - it's wonderful (except now we're needing upgrades of trackage and rolling stock again. > > In these parts a trolley is what you put your shopping into at the > supermarket. Many of the supermarkets are starting to call them > trundlers for some reason. Those are called carts (short of grocery carts) around these parts. -- "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." -Henri Cartier-Bresson
