13th April – all day

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Still placed with the Technical Services department, today I’m touring various depots to see some project work which is currently going on within the company. A design is under consideration for conversion of three double-deck vehicles to open-top tour vehicles, and two single-deck MAN vehicles are moving back to single-door configuration with added luggage space for use on the airport route. The latter project is considerably more mature, with one vehicle already tilt-tested entered service. The two vehicles undergoing conversion are with an external contractor at a depot in Sha Tin in the New Territories. The depot itself is a mess, reminiscent of certain other small, unprofessional workshops I’ve seen in the UK. In common with these small workshops, the quality of work was good although I have my concerns about the integrity of some of the fabrication work here. Since we were in the right area I’m taken to the Jit Luen bodyworks, a manufacturing shop where complete bodies are built onto new chassis. The quality of workmanship here is very high and construction is lightly modularised, with body sides built on a jig and aligned onto the chassis, when the roof is added. Jit Luen are famed for their fibreglass manufacture and their paintwork and I have to say the results are very professional, even though their workshop is again a health and safety hazard with no PPE around the glass fibres which are littered inch-deep everywhere.

Lunch is at the Chinese equivalent of a trucker’s café with a prawn and egg combo, and cuts of chicken from skin to bone with everything between. Following this street scene we move on to see the converted MAN bus in service at the airport, and I get chance to see some of the route operation which is snapping wheel studs on the double-deck vehicles. Next we move on to see a Hong Kong depot with a similar number of vehicles to Bath depot, and the facilities are quite comparable with a similar number of pits, men and storage space. There’s also the essential storage space for dumping things, usually bus seats. It’s comforting to see the same problems halfway round the world.

Today’s song is ‘Breathe’ by the Prodigy, since I can and most of the glassfibre workers won’t be able to in ten years time.

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