Lots of us are destined to become grey nomads but precious few of us, shopping for that mobile home, will be able to afford a Winnebago. And so why not, instead, purchase that monarch of the road, a retired ACTION bus? Even the cheapest Winnebago costs about $80,000 (the dearest can cost as much as $300,000, making that mobile home a kind of mobile McMansion) but the retired Renault/Mack ACTION buses cost just $4000. After that, of course, there is much to do.
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The fact that there are old orange and blue ACTION buses for sale and that lots of them are being sold emerged yesterday while this columnist, continuing his restless but increasingly futile-seeming quest for a Walkley Award, was doing a related story.
If buses could go grey then ACTION's 236 surviving orange and blue ones would be greying around the temples now because the first of them were bought in the mid 1970s. These oldies are being phased out now (in favour of the young, brash, fresh-faced green and white ones) but ACTION has announced that it is increasing the working lifespans of the venerable buses. The ACT government has given $473,000 to ACTION's bus engine overhaul program for the 2011-12 financial year. With this money ACTION is adding five years to the older charabancs' working lives while using the work of overhauling their emeritus engines as training for apprentice mechanics.
"Guess what? You're going to be very famous!" one of Eligh Hart's workmates announced, having introduced the shy senior apprentice to The Canberra Times' photographer at Belconnen yesterday. (Actually the workmate didn't say "very" but the word he did use, while colourful, won't do for a family column.)
Hart, from Isabella Plains, obliging but a little flustered, started to worry about his appearance even though, oil-stained and grubby, he looked the very model of a modern apprentice mechanic. "I haven't done my hair or anything. And what about my tattoos? Would you rather I rolled my sleeves down? I'm a bit nervous."
Reassured of his picture-perfectness he plunged back into the engine of an old orange and blue bus, explaining that the engine was a bit of a "dinosaur" compared with its counterparts in the new, youthful buses. But he still discussed the dinosaur engine with great affection, the way motor mechanics do.
And then in discussion he told us of how people buy and drive away the old, retired buses to turn them into mobile homes. "They put proper plumbing in them, and even spas."
Yes, ACTION confirms that since August 2010 it has "retired" 57 of its orange and blue buses. Seven were donated for emergency training purposes, 19 were recycled after being stripped of valuable parts and 31 were sold to new owners.
The young and oil-stained Hart knew of one "retired" bus that had been bought by a local paintball skirmish company. Following up this clue with the probing, investigative talents one needs if one is to ever earn a Walkley, this columnist tracked down Kieran Hynes of Adventure Consultants. The company stages adventure paintball at their pigment-splattered Tuggeranong premises.
Hynes has actually bought two retired ACTION buses, both Renault/Macks made in 1989. One is out and about on the road and the other "isn't going anywhere".
"There's my pink party bus that I use for bucks' and hens' parties. It's got TV, stereo, a PA system. everything. It's very popular. My bus No. 2 is still in ACTION livery and it's the major barricade on a paintball field. It's very popular with everyone who [exasperated] has used public transport in Canberra. People just enjoy shooting at it!"
His pink party bus is so pink, he explained, because ACTION insists you must give your old ACTION bus new and different colours if its to be out on the roads and because there are all sorts of other colours you're forbidden from using lest your bus look too much like a fire engine or ambulance or some other official vehicle.
"So pink was just about the only colour left!" he laughed.
Retiring with indignity
It will occur to some of us, those of us who love buses and who think they should be allowed great dignity in retirement, that the fates of these two buses are enduring fates worse than death. The usual death for an old bus is dismembering for scrap. That's bad enough. But bucks' parties! Paintball wars!
Far better, in retirement or semi-retirement, to go on as some old ACTION buses do to be a charismatic and history-rich orange and blue shed in a bush backyard, to be a bus in a less glamorous place than Canberra or to become a mobile home. ACTION maintenance manager Paul Mascord advised yesterday that some retired ACTION buses go on to enjoy different, twilight bus careers in other bailiwicks.
Sometimes they become school buses. Today there are buses that once purred to and fro along Canberra's leafy boulevardes working in places as remote and unCanberra-like as Kalgoorlie. Do these buses, toiling away in unfashionable places now, pine for the good old days of their youth when they worked in the buzzing, metrosexual metropolis of the federal capital? Mascord knows of several people who are at work right now converting old orange and blue buses (to find out how to go about buying one go to ACTION's website) to mobile homes.
But for some potential buyers, he points out, the fact that these dear old fogey buses are governed so that they can never go faster than a sedate 85km/h is a deterrent for those who live their lives in a far faster lane than that.
