Thursday 28 February 2008

Quiet Day, Mostly


Traffic was quiet today which was nice. The morning started with a school run to Churston and ended with a school run from Newton Abbot but the bit in the middle was almost boring. Apart from lunch time when I walked down to the sea front looking to see if tonnes of rock were spread all over the roadway. No a pebble to be found. Bit of a disappointment really. What I did see was a couple of workmen removing part of the central reservation just in front of the Tor Bay Hotel. This gap will allow traffic heading for Torquay to move to the left carriageway to get round the roundabout onto Cary Parade. The seaward side carriageway will be opened for two way traffic from, hopefully some time soon. A couple of weeks maybe. It all depends on if the council can erect avalanche proof barriers along the landward side of the road fairly soon. This will involve putting up 350 metres of scaffolding to hold the barriers. However in the local paper there was an article which stated that such barriers were available with a delivery date of 8 weeks.

The white van shows how much room there is here but the big problem could be all the trees on the left. When this road was open we always moved out into the middle of the carriageway to get away from the trees, the camber of the road tended to make the bus lean slightly to the left, not something you bother about driving a car. It is expected that someone from the company will drive a bus along before traffic is allowed down there just to make sure we aren't going to be giving bus window manufacturers plenty of business.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

haha what? Have you ever seen a First Bus decker? I know they are rare, but they don't have the steel bars on the front as you do.

The old things they have around here have had to be patched up with gaffa tape from the 30A route which involves hitting several tree trunks at 20mph, as well as a telegraph cable smacking the front windscreen and scraping across the roof.

You could just get some bloke with a chainsaw to stand on the roof of an open decker and flail around madly to cut down errant branches.
Would be a great marketing tool for the bay.

Anonymous said...

First bus deckers in devon do have tree fenders, but only on routes for which they are needed, e.g. 93 plymouth to dartmouth

David said...

Tree fenders are a waste of space. They are only as strong as what they are bolted on to and the tops of buses don't tend to be as strong as trees

Anonymous said...

Yeah, the bars are more for brushing twigs away so they don't sratch things than to protect from a full on branh/window attack!!