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'RALPH KRAMDEN RIDES AGAIN!'

 
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Mr. Linsky
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Joined: 16 Apr 2007
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Location: BRENTWOOD, CA. - WOODMERE, N.Y.

PostPosted: Sat Dec 22, 2012 4:18 pm    Post subject: 'RALPH KRAMDEN RIDES AGAIN!' Reply with quote

'For the Holidays, a Nostalgia Trip on a Bus Like Ralph Kramden?s'


By JAMES BARRON - New York Times 12/22/12

For the holidays, the transit system is rolling out vintage crosstown buses in Manhattan, including one like Ralph Kramden's -- right down to the No. 2969 on the side.


?I?m in a time machine right now,? John Davies said from his seat beside a window that, like the people on the bus in the nursery-school lyric, went up and down. A ?drop-style window,? to those in the know.

And what a time machine it was: A bus like the one Jackie Gleason was pictured in when television was new, ?The Honeymooners? was a top-rated show, Gleason played a loudmouthed bus driver named Ralph Kramden and the fare was 15 cents. Unless it was 13 cents, the amount on the sign on the bus when Gleason posed for pictures.

The bus is one of several vintage buses that have come out of retirement as part of a holiday promotion by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. They have been assigned to the 42nd Street crosstown line in Manhattan on weekdays until Dec. 28. (Rain and snow keep them from their appointed rounds. ?We don?t send our babies out in bad weather,? said Charles Seaton, a spokesman for the transit agency.)

The bus, No. 2969, does not have air-conditioning. It does not have a passenger-operated exit door ? the driver opens and closes it by pushing a silver handle to his left that also controls the front door. It does not have a windshield with a panoramic view. It does not have flashing lights on the front, the way ?select bus service? buses do. It does not wear the blue-and-white uniform of modern New York buses. Its colors are green and silver, just as they always were.

For some passengers who are serious about buses ? passengers who consider the real star of the 1994 runaway-bus movie ?Speed? to have been not Sandra Bullock nor Keanu Reeves, but the bus ? riding No. 2969 was a treat worth waiting at the bus stop for. They brought cameras to snap photographs of the old bus, one of 400 that joined the fleet in 1948 and carried passengers in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island but not the Bronx, according to the transit agency. For some of its life, it carried schoolchildren.

No. 2969 is older than the bus in ?Speed.? Mr. Davies, 25, an art director at an advertising agency, said the look inside No. 2969 was ?industrial, but it?s cozy.?

?You can really sense these buses were sculpted, made by someone,? he said. ?The current buses look generic, make me think ?airport.??

And he liked the soft green seats in No. 2969. ?They?re more comfortable than seats in current buses,? he said.

It was long for its day, inside and out. No. 2969 and its garage-mates were longer than earlier buses ? 40 feet long, even though they were built on the same chassis as their 35-foot-long predecessors.

Otto Yamamaoto, 53, said he remembered riding similar buses in San Diego in the 1970s, when he was in junior high school. ?The new ones are a lot bigger and not quite so noisy,? he said. ?But the buses like this have a little more character.?

One woman on her way to the Upper West Side ? ?I won?t give my name; I have a record,? she declared ? said the old buses were an improvement. She complained about poor service on 42nd Street, especially since the transit agency shortened the M104 route. It once ran along 42nd Street to First Avenue, but now goes only as far east as Seventh Avenue.

The result, she said, was that buses on 42nd Street seem few and far between. ?You can stand and wait 20, 25 minutes? before one comes, she said. When the old buses are running, she said, the waiting times are shorter.

In the driver?s seat was Gary Kull, who is 56 and has spent 26 years as a bus driver. ?No power steering,? he said. ?It brings back the old days, when I started. We didn?t have power steering.?

The buses in the fleet when he was a novice were newer than the long-retired vehicles like No. 2969 that are back on the street for the holiday promotion. But there is some revisionist history about the No. 2969 that he was driving. It began life as No. 4789. Later it went through an identity change and was given the number of the bus that Gleason was pictured in, with Audrey Meadows, Art Carney and Joyce Randolph hanging out the windows.

The original No. 2969 did not last until ?The Honeymooners? was delighting a new generation. Mr. Seaton, the transit authority spokesman, said the original No. 2969 ?would have been a New York City Omnibus (private operator) vehicle? and ?may or may not have been absorbed? by the transit authority in the 1962 takeover of Fifth Avenue Coach Lines.

So what happened to the original No. 2969? It was ?definitely scrapped,? he said.

Original # 2969 photo (top) from the Everett Collection.
# 2969 museum piece (bottom) borrowed for educational purposes only.

Mr. Linsky - Green Bus Lines, Inc., Jamaica, New York


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W.B. Fishbowl



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PostPosted: Mon Nov 10, 2014 9:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Of course, the No. 2969 in which Gleason and his Honeymooners cast posed for publicity photos was a TDH-4509, one of 75 buses (numbered 2947 - 3021) built and delivered for NYCO between November and December 1950. There is a question as to whether it saw MaBSTOA service before being scrapped.

That the bus now passed off as 2969 was once NYCTS 4789, that the Times article got right.
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W.B. Fishbowl



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PostPosted: Sun Feb 05, 2017 1:14 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

P.S. As another of the pics in that photo session (taken on the 56th Street side of what was then the Park Sheraton Hotel which was Gleason's home/office at the time; you can detect on the far right end the MONY building) reveal, this particular bus was running on the route 2 Madison Avenue line (which, with FACCO's route of the same number, were consolidated into today's M2 upon Fifth and Madison Avenues' conversions to one-way southbound and northbound, respectively, in 1966; I wonder which company's 2 had the 2A designation after the 1962 city takeover and initial ministration under MABSTOA); would anyone know at which NYCO depot this was kept at the time, given what bus numbers were assigned to which routes (i.e. 2700's assigned to route 6 Broadway, a.k.a. now-defunct Broadway/Sixth Avenue M6)? Definitely for the next six years after 1956 the company name listed below the passenger windows would have read 'FIFTH AVENUE COACH LINES' with 'INC.' in the same type size as 'OPERATOR'.

This original 2969 did indeed survive a few years into the MABSTOA era, and as of September 1965 - some ten years after Gleason, Audrey Meadows, Art Carney and Joyce Randolph posed inside that bus, and with a newer two-tone green paint job that other Old Looks of both MABSTOA and NYCTA sported - it was assigned to the 100th Street (OHS) depot on Manhattan's Upper East Side from which, no doubt, it would have held down the 101 and 101A routes (today's M101 and M102) and whatever other lines originated from that depot. I reckon when it was retired and scrapped would have been about 1967, after the 480-bus order of GM TDH-5303 'Fishbowls' (8301-8780) with air conditioning and all equipped with 'batwings' atop the passenger windows, was delivered.
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MaBSTOA 15



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PostPosted: Wed Feb 08, 2017 9:13 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

According to the February 1969 issue of Motor Coach Age on New York City Omnibus... the following is stated on page 17...

"New York City Omnibus was unusual among large transit properties in that buses were traditionally assigned not merely to garages but actually to individual routes. In later years, the route assignments were stencilledn on the windshields. The oldest tabulation available is dated December 28. 1950, and is reproduced here (in the magazine)...

#2969 was assigned to the 100 Street Depot and to route 18, 86th Street Crosstown!

The Honeymooners did not debut till 1955. Therefore, am sure 2969 was reassigned to route 1/2 Madison Avenue out of the same depot.

The Motor Coach Age issue of May 1972 on the First 10 Years of Mabstoa lists the following routes operating out of the 100 Street Depot:

6 -72 St Crosstown; 17 -79 St Crosstown; 18 -86 St Crosstown; 19 -96 St Crosstown; 101 -Third-Lexington & Amsterdam; 101A -Third-Lexington & Lenox; 107 -106 St Crosstown

The route 2A -Fifth-Madison & Seventh Ave was now operating out of the 146 Street Depot.
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W.B. Fishbowl



Age: 57
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Location: New York, New York, USA

PostPosted: Thu Feb 09, 2017 2:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

So it could be said for most if not all of 2969's existence, it was based out of OHS, and may well have done those crosstowns as well as the others in their twilight years under MABSTOA aegis.

As for the routes, let's see if what some routes later became is right:
- 72nd Street crosstown (M)6 (later M30, now M72)
- 79th Street crosstown (M)17 (now M79)
- 86th Street crosstown (M)18 (now M86)
- 96th Street crosstown (M)19 (now M96)
- 106th Street crosstown (M)107 (now M106)
- Third, Lexington and Lenox Avenues (M)101A (now M102)
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