• Location: CB4 0WS
• Mood: sleepy

Oh noe! It's a bus on wheels!

Well, like what I said, I were in Bristol on Friday (and practically so on Saturday). The purpose of said trip was claroscuro's brother's graduation.

Anyway, to simplify things we travelled out on Thursday, and stayed with curig, venturing into Bristol via train on Friday morning (along with him, on his way to work). Now, we knew from the ticket-office-clerk that the train was going to be short formed (and indeed, they were going to stop the following Virgin "through" train in order to handle customers who were unable to get on their intended one), so I was expecting something like a class 155 or (if we were really lucky) a two-unit class 165 to show up, particularly since this is the heart of the commuting South-West. But there I was on the platform, going "Oh noe! That's no train!" as a class 143 turned up (probably the one in that picture, it was certainly painted the same). This, naturally, brought back bad memories of the class 142s on the Harrogate line at York, where I first encountered the Pacer railbus, an experiment in using off-the-shelf bus parts to build trains with. These things have only four wheels per unit, so it's "ber-doing-dee, ber-doing-dee" all the way.... On the plus side the one we traveled on did appear to have had its seats upgraded from bus-style to airline-style, not that that made much difference to those of us packed in the passage-way between units. Whilst this was a journey much preferable to my experiences on the DLR during rush-hour, I don't think that that's really a recommendation…