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1. View of Sandtoft Depot showing Doncaster Motor Bus no. 33 (Leyland Tiger Cub), Derby Trolleybus no. 172 (Utility Body) & Porto (Portugal) no. 140 (Lancia).     Photo: Alison Wilson

 
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2. Bradford Trolleybuses nos. 834 & 746. The former was new to Darlington and also ran in Doncaster before being bought by Bradford and having a new body fitted.     Photo: Alison Wilson

 
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3. Cleethorpes no. 54 (AEC Trolleybus with Park Royal Bodywork) being pushed into the depot building by the museum's Leyland PD1.     Photo: Alison Wilson

 
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4. Huddersfield Trolleybus no. 631 (Sunbeam S7A with East Lancs Bodywork) running along the Museum's trolley wire circuit. The main depot building is in the background.     Photo: Alison Wilson
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This photograph is displayed in a slightly larger format in an attempt to show how the booms mounted on the bus's roof make contact with the overhead wires, but the wires are too thin to be seen clearly against the sky. What can be seen is the mast which supports them. Trolleybuses need two wires, one to pick up current and the other to return it. This is an important difference from tramway systems which generally have only one overhead wire because they can return current through their metal wheels and rails. Trolleybuses of course have rubber tyres.

Another difference between trolleybuses and trams is that the booms (or poles) on trolleybuses cannot be turned round. This makes it very tricky to reverse a trolleybus without de-wiring the booms. By contrast, many tramcars can be driven from either end and they simply reverse direction when they reach the end of their line. Their booms can be lowered, pulled round and raised again to face the opposite direction. Alternatively, tramcars can be fitted with two different booms, one for each direction. It is not generally a good idea to have both raised at the same time because one will almost certainly de-wire! - though the producers of the film, Roger Rabbit, thought it was OK to have both booms raised on the mock-up tramcars used in the film. The other option of course is to use a pantograph which can be designed to work in either direction. (That's enough about tramcars! - Ed.)

 
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5. The same Huddersfield trolleybus being pulled out of the Depot by a Nuffield Universal tractor.     Photo: Alison Wilson

 
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6. A Swiss trolleybus at Sandtoft.     Photo: Alison Wilson

This is not our only foreign vehicle: others include the Museum's tallest bus, an enormous and very long Portuguese vehicle from Oporto (see picture 1); and what has to be the Museum's most unusual bus, a sort of "one and a half decker" from Aachen, Germany (see picture 8).

Oporto's trolleybus system was officially discontinued in December 1997. The city now operates only motor buses, but they have preserved a few trolleybuses and are thinking of opening a sort of museum trolley line along the river front.

Sandtoft was offered no. 140 for preservation (and we are still trying to pay off the cost of transporting it from Portugal, any donations will be welcomed by the Finance Director!). It is a double deck Lancia dating from about 1967, which probably makes it our second youngest trolleybus. It is left hand drive, of course, so the entrance is on the right hand - as is the exit. This bus was designed for crew operation with a conductor selling tickets from a booth at the back of the bus, so originally passengers had to board at the back and alight at the front. To assist this process the bus even has two separate staircases to the top deck, at front and back. When one person operation came in, the passenger flow was reversed, entering at the front (to pay the driver) and leaving at the back.

Six other Oporto trolleys are officially preserved at a disused motorbus depot in Oporto (Carcereira Depot - not open to the public). These are: no. 1, a 2 door BUT bus of 1959; no. 23, a 3 door BUT bus of 1962; no. 49, a single deck Lancia vehicle of about 1967; no. 102, a double deck Lancia of about 1967 (similar to 140); and two other buses, numbers unknown, one 2 axle, one 3 axle articulated, of EFACEC design and built around 1984/5.

Of the 50 original double deck vehicles, 10 at least were broken up. Most of the remainder were re-used as temporary classrooms in schools around northern Portugal. 3 of these are likely to be recovered and restored.

A recent issue of "Preserved Buses" magazine (no. 6) had an article about the motor bus fleet in Oporto, and a picture spread of Sandtoft's last European Day.

 
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7. Britain's most modern trolleybus, now based at Sandtoft.

This is South Yorkshire PTE no. 2450, a Dennis Dominator chassis with Alexander bodywork, seen here running under the wires at Sandtoft. A hybrid vehicle, it can run on diesel fuel or electricity. During the 1980's, this bus was based at Doncaster's Leicester Avenue garage. A quiet road alongside Doncaster Racecourse was specially equipped with trolley wires and masts and used for extensive tests of this vehicle, but the uncertainty caused by bus service deregulation meant it never entered commercial service. The trolley wires at the Racecourse were dismantled in the mid 1990's and no traces now remain.

After being withdrawn from test service, the bus was extensively "cannibalised" to provide spares for its unelectrified brethren - as you can see, its bodywork is much the same as that on the normal Dominators which were SYPTE's standard double deck vehicle. It was restored when Leicester Avenue garage was remodelled a few years ago. The vehicle remains the property of South Yorkshire PTE but it is based at Sandtoft so that it can be displayed to the public.      Photo: Alison Wilson

 
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8. Aachen 22 in the workshops.     Photo: Alison Wilson

This is a kind of utility vehicle dating from the end of the Second World War and designed for maximum passenger capacity. Its front looks like a normal single deck vehicle, but the floor drops down at the back to accommodate an upper deck for half the vehicle's length. This "half deck" has truly "anti-social" seating - not only is it offset, with a side gangway, but it has very little headroom.