Bus body forms

That is not the case. Many of them do, but there are plenty of flat-front/rear engine school buses. What's most probable is that the school districts in your area use mostly front-engine buses, so that's all you see.

The flat-front/rear engine buses tend to be built for heavier-duty service.

DS

Aren't the rear setups diesel electric and the front engine ones a conventional engine and drivetrain?

Mike

"Daniel J. Stern" wrote:

No, not necessarily, though Seattle and a few other places do have rear-engine diesel/electric buses. The majority of rear-engine buses are conventional diesel-, gasoline-, or CNG-fuelled combustion engine setups.

DS

|I'm not sure if this is the right group to ask this question -- if |not, please direct me. | |I was wondering why almost all school buses have the body form with |the engine in a separate compartment in front, like a truck or car, |while most public transportation buses have the body form with the |engine within the interior, so that there is no separate compartment |for the engine and the engine is accessed from within the bus. Why is |the "flat front" bus form used for public transportation and the |"truck front" bus form used for school buses? Does this have |something to do with a safety factor, a mandated form(s), or is this |just custom that has endured? Does anbody know?

I'd bet the conventional front engine, rear drive chassis is much cheaper to maintain than a pusher. Rex in Fort Worth

Back in the good old days, at least in the country schools where I went to school, the bus drivers were under contract to the school and had to provide the chassis and front end. The chassis ith the front end was taken to the bus company or dealer and a body put on. When the body got to a certain age, the school would require a new one, so the driver would take the bus in and the old body was taken off and the new one put on. These days, school districts appear to own the bus outright, unless they contract with a transportation company to provide the service.

The rear engine layout also allows the driver to view the road completely to the front of the bus. Much less chance of a kid, obscured by the hood, being run over.

Chas Hurst

Not by a long shot. Grehound (MCI) and Trailways (Eagle Coach) busses, as well as GMC and Grumman Flxible city busses were rear-engine (diesel) with an Allison automatic about 40 years before people ever started to think about diesel-electric busses. And today, everyone from Gillig to BlueBird to New Flyer to VanHool and Prevost and all the other countless players in the transit market sell rear engine diesels with conventional automatics.

I think it comes down to who the big players in the market are and cost. International Harvester (today Navistar International) has had, by FAR, the vast majority of school bus chassis sales in the US for decades. Their chassis design is an engine-compartment forward design, which allows the OTHER companies that put school-bus bodies on the chassis (companies like Ward, Wayne, BlueBird, Carpenter, etc.) to design completely independently of the Navistar sheet metal. When Navistar changes their hood, Carpenter doesn't have to change their bus body. And I think that tended to force the other players in the market (GMC truck and at one time both Ford and Dodge) to stick to a form factor that a Carpenter or Ward chassis that fit on an IH chassis would bolt right onto.

Its also a very very cheap design, very rugged, handles reasonably well (hard to use that word with a straight face when it comes to a school bus), and has super low life-cycle costs (simple suspension, simple driveline, etc.

There are a good number of front-engine rear-drive school busses that do have the driver sitting over the engine (flat front), but that tends to be a space-wasting design.

A small percentage are rear-engine rear-drive like Grehound busses and city busses (LA area school districts seem to have a lot of these). But if you've ever looked at the rear suspension on these, its a lot more complicated than an IH front-engine with a big truck axle and leaf springs. More like what you'd find on a front-drive car, or a complicated affair where the transmission actually rides on the suspension. Works great for transportation-geared fleets (city bus fleets, Greyhound, etc), but is a bit beyond the shoestring transportation budget of most school districts.