This post concerns the five new Enviro 400/E40D's delivered to Quality Line for the contract renewal of route 418. The buses are coded DD14-18, and run from Epsom (EB) garage. The code DD stands for Double-Decker, indicating that Quality Line would only buy Enviro 400 Double-Deckers until DD01-18 left the fleet.The contract renewal coincided with a frequency increase on both this route and the 406, and the new intake almost immediately appeared on QL's other double deck routes, like the 406 and 467 as well as the normally single-deck 463.
I expected the new buses to look completely different from DD01-13, which I assumed would retain their yellow blinds, and that they would look like this:
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| Here is DD11, starting a journey at Kingston. |
However, something I didn't know was that the older Enviro's were going to be refurbished, so on a very wet Saturday 28th June, I was in for a shock when I saw this:
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| A refurbished DD06 finishing a journey on route 418. This bus looked identical to the picture above a few weeks ago. |
There are only a few, subtle differences between the old and new buses from the front end, look at these two:
OLD: NEW:
Personally, I quite like the Quality Line Enviro 400's, mostly because of their unique interior.
Here is a gallery of some old (but refurbished) Enviro's, and some new ones:
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| Lower Saloon interior facing forwards. |
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| Lower Saloon interior facing the rear. |
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| How embarrassing, it doesn't fit! It didn't do what most buses do when the name is too long to fit the screen (which is having the name moving from left to right repeatedly), it just cut of two letters of the word Hall! |
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| Here is one of the new intake on route 406, without a logo. |
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| Upper Saloon interior. |
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| The rear of SL14 LND. |
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| Here is SL14 LNE, completing another 406 journey in Kingston. |
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| Finally, one of the old but refurbished buses at Brook Street, Kingston. |
Thanks for reading this very short post!
