1 city bus to Chicago IL (breakdown)

... spending the night at Albany NY

... it is after midnight and we just checked into the hotel. The bus will be hauled back to the shipper and we are deadheading home in a rental car.

(The following was written three days later)

We head out of the hotel just before 8 AM, we are only a few miles from the shipper and I wanted to get there after they opened. As we leave, we drive past the bus we saw in the parking lot last night. It is still there. The bus in the other lot is gone, he was the one that was just heading to NYC.

There are people ahead of me and the guard is not having a good day, the guard keeps making mistakes as they are trying to get the people the credentials they need to enter the building.

This person today does not say anything about coming out to the bus with me. They just sign my paperwork and I sign and take theirs.

Bus inspects OK, but when I try to leave it will not move. Actually I found it would not move as we were doing the inspection. When BB checks the break and reverse lights I move the bus a foot or two. Or try to.

So I head back into the office and the guard sends a message to someone and I go back to my bus. And wait. I didn't time it but I was going to head back in in five minutes when the first person came to check on the bus. I <> told them what I thought was wrong with it and that seemed to be what they went with.

Then a second tech came out and re-loaded the computer system. They have a build mode and a customer mode. The shipper has to install the customer mode so that they know everything works, but then they are supposed to over-write it with the build mode so we can drive them to the shipper. They hadn't. But they assured me that there should not be any more issues :)

(I should have stopped and re-started the bus there, I did not. It was running so I ran with it.)

2nd stop was the rest area in Glens Falls. From there I called dispatch to tell them I was up and running and down the road.

I had sat at the shipper for almost two hours and had left the bus run, not issues. But when I stopped here the bus timed out in about five minutes and did it's idle shut down. Different mode I suppose. Usually I shut the bus off before trying to re-start but this time because it had 'died' it was still in run mode. I just pushed the starter and it ran.

55 mph. This will take a couple of more hours than I had guessed. Also because it is my first bus and I have already heard about issues, I am running an extra 100 miles to stay on the freeway. So that adds up to about four more hours than at first glance.

3rd stop is the Pattersonville Oasis for food. We had two hours at the shipper this AM instead of 15 minutes and another two and a half hours of drive time so now it is food time. BB doesn't want to drive 55 following me in the rental car so she gives me a head start and ended up catching up to me as I pulled in.

NY is redoing all of their oasis, but this is still one of the old ones and out of six food places, Roy Rogers is the only one still open. And by looking at a Roy Rogers map, this is the only store in the state still open. It is still old style fast food, they have about 20 kinds of food they keep on the shelf but if they are out or you want something special, you get fresh food. Pretty much like McD's used to do it except that here the customer grabs it off the shelf and at McD's the staff used to grab it off the shelf.

Lunch was a little over done but OK. Not sure why but it took us 45 minutes to eat and get back to the bus.

Bus starts but will not drop into gear. So I shut it off and try again, same thing. So I turn the battery off and repeat. A couple of times and then I call the shipper. By the time the shipper called back the bus would either die as soon as it 'woke up,' or within 5-10 seconds of when I started the bus.

I talk to three different techs and they all walk me through the same steps as I did before I called them. Finally the fourth tech asked me what was happening and said 'We'll call a tow truck.' By the time I was off the phone I had a text message from dispatch saying that I was to be the person calling the breakdown line and they would call the tow.

This started at 2:15, the tow truck finally had the bus loaded and pulled out at 11:45. It was a long ordeal. Something that should not have happened ... the delays. I talked to about 10 people at the breakdown line before someone took it upon themselves to do what should have been done hours before. In the first minutes of the first call.

The tow truck guys were great. They had had this flat bed built 15 years ago to haul buses before the shipper decided to have them driven to delivery ... well, now they are starting to build electric buses so they will need to be hauled. But right now ...

These two guys knew exactly what they were doing and what the other person was doing. Very little was said, each person had their job and the seemed to know where / when / what the other person was doing.

I was in a parking lot and IF this had been done when I first broke down, the parking lot was empty. But now almost all spots were full and at first they thought the were going to have to tow it to somewhere they could load it. Then one of the wrecker guys went and talked to a truck driver :) when he came back he said he had 'learned a new language, but the driver will move.'

I'm guessing it took them about an hour to load the bus. They tried the bus and it started and moved ... opps. But then it died. They were able to move the bus under it's own power about a foot at a time before it died until the bus was half way on the trailer. Then it would no longer go into gear before it died. From there they had to tow it on the flat bed.

For quite a while I thought that we would be here all night. Could have been if these two had been on another call. After the fact, it sounds like this company has the rights to this section of tollway. So not sure why the breakdown line had to ask me a million questions, there was only one company they could call.

Somewhere after dark BB walked back in to get a box of chicken. Very dry, but it was food.

During all of this my phone was loosing charge and I did not expect it to last the night. At times it was even loosing charge when we were charging it in the car. Most of the day, night we had the car running so that the battery could charge, if it would.

We wait until the bus is loaded and then follow it out. I had told the bus dispatcher as soon as I knew it was going back to the shipper that I was done. They wanted me to come back for another bus. No. I needed to leave the shipper the latest by 4 PM today. If I headed back I would not get to the shipper until noon the day after I needed to leave ... and I would have a 2nd bus with the same issues as the first. I should never had accepted a bus with such as narrow window of time.

While we waited BB had found that the cheapest rental car was back in Albany and then found the cheapest Choice hotel at the next exit. It was after mid-night when we arrived at the hotel.

It will likely take me three days to get back on a good sleep schedule.

Load board

US - 373

IA - 146/144

Tomorrow we pick up our one way car at about 10 AM and then it is a few hours back to Syracuse to drop the local car before heading home. We went with a three day car so we do not need to push it to get home. A two day car from Syracuse would have been the same cost as the three day from Albany. And we would have had to push, push, push after being up most of tonight. Not a good idea.