A book that guides you on all/different buses?

Hi all,

I'm pretty new into the whole bus thing and was wondering if you could recommend me any books/magazines that could show me each of the bus models that run in the UK nowadays and the differences between each? Since i have trouble differentiating especially bus chassis

milspii said:

Hi all,

I'm pretty new into the whole bus thing and was wondering if you could recommend me any books/magazines that could show me each of the bus models that run in the UK nowadays and the differences between each? Since i have trouble differentiating especially bus chassis

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Ian Allan used to publish books like that however I'm not aware of any recent ones and the last ones they produced wouldn't include most of what's around nowadays. There are various fleet lists on the internet (https://ukbuses.co.uk/ being one) that will give information about what your local fleets contain, however one of the easiest ways is to use a site like https://www.flickr.com/ and type in the name of the chassis/body style or bus registration you're interested in and see what comes up.

To me differentiating chassis types nowadays is much too complex (if the manufacturers badges have been removed) and appears to involve needing sight of air intake locations, counting the number of wheel nuts and carrying a selection of tarot cards!

carlberry said:

...however one of the easiest ways is to use a site like https://www.flickr.com/ and type in the name of the chassis/body style or bus registration you're interested in and see what comes up.

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Adding on to this, I would recommend using https://bustimes.org as it shows fleet lists and provides a link to Flickr with each bus so you view images of that type of bus.

For example:

Used to be a Bus and Coach Recognition book published which gave a decent rundown of all the types found in current revenue earning service. But not sure if there’s been any editions in the past decade

ChrisPJ said:

Used to be a Bus and Coach Recognition book published which gave a decent rundown of all the types found in current revenue earning service. But not sure if there’s been any editions in the past decade

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Indeed the Ian Allan abc books as referred to by carlberry in his post. I have one somewhere. I know of nothing like these produced today either as a hard copy or a computer based version. Perhaps a set of Top Trumps bus and coach cards would be useful in this case especially to keep us entertained during these quiet times for our hobby. Don't think many would do well in the 0-60 speed times though.

Very much work in progress, I aim to cover vehicles you see on the road nowadays I doubt I'd be able to build a full set of every single type that existed

https://www.flickr.com/photos/185981791@N03/

A Flickr site I set up with a picture of each vehicle type and a description on how to ID it, descriptions need some re-writing and typos fixing, and so far it only covers Solo's.

Will hopefully get round to building it up

This book is pretty good as a visual guide although is a few years old so doesn't have all the newest types:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/British-Bu...ds=british+bus+drawings&qid=1585921239&sr=8-1

Yeah some buses are hard to define.

E200S , E300s , all can be slightly different , look at Stagecoach. And streetdecks vs B5TLs . B7TLscan in different forms etc

Don't forget Bus Lists on the Web... .