New Electric Trolleybuses for Seattle

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rickycourtney

rickycourtney

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Dec 21, 2012
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The first of Seattle's new trolleybuses (buses powered by overhead electric wires) arrived this week.

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For the bus geeks out there, it's a New Flyer Xcelsior XT40. It's King County Metro's first trolleybus to be low floor, have air conditioning and operate "off-wire" (thanks to special battery packs).

King County Metro has ordered 86 of these 40-foot XT40 buses, and 55 60-foot XT60 buses.

A bit of background:

To the casual observer Metro's current 40 foot trolleybuses don't appear to be that old. The bodies were actually built in 2002 by Gillig... but at their heart they're much older.

They were actually built on top of the motors, propulsion controls and other components from the retired fleet of 1979 AM General trolleys. It's become incredibly difficult for Metro's maintenance staff to find parts to repair this 35 year old equipment.

Metro's fleet of 60 foot trolleybuses were built in 1990 by Breda. Yes THAT Breda. The company is notorious for making horrible light rail vehicles and their buses weren't any better. They were originally built as dual mode tunnel buses (diesel engine for city streets, electric engine for the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel) but after Metro bought hybrid tunnel buses they were refurbished. Even after the refurb, they're falling apart. At this point Metro doesn't even have enough trolleybuses to run the basic level of service (hybrid diesel buses are substituted).
 
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Hmmm....interesting. I wonder what Boston's MBTA will use when it's time to replace their dual-mode Neoplan's on their Silver Line?....
 
I wonder if the MBTA will keep its trolleybuses and dual mode buses after the Neoplans are retired. King County Metro has been very successful operating hybrid diesel electric buses in the tunnel.

Seattle seriously considered replacing all the trolleybuses with hybrid buses, but the trolleybuses are uniquely suited for Seattle's hilly streets.
 
The new trolleybuses look sweet!

There was a serious possibility of Seattle replacing them all with diesel or CNG -- they even put out a report with horribly biased numbers claiming that it would be cheaper -- but the environmental and transportation lobbies pushed to get them to redo their study and keep the trolleybuses. I'm very glad it was successful.

If these trolleybuses work out well, it may inspire the other cities with trolleybuses to maintain and expand their trolleybus networks. Maybe there will even be some new systems. (Hmmm. I should suggest it for Ithaca, which is even hillier than Seattle.)

There's been a problem for a while with lack of trolleybus manufacturers -- hence the weird stuff which Seattle did with rebuilding trolleybuses, and Philadelphia suspending trolleybus service from 2002 to 2008.

The off-wire / battery capability also should simplify the problem of wiring up intersections, which is one of the traditional weak points of trolleybuses. Junctions are very complicated when you have to maintain two wires of different polarities. When all the trolleybuses have some battery capability, the intersections could be de-energized, simplifying the problem a great deal.
 
Well one North American City decommissioned all of its trolley buses very recently in 2009, Edmonton, Alberta. They had a huge system and decided to replace all there trolley buses with diesel buses "claiming" they would be cheaper.
 
Nathanael that's the infamous "Seattle process" for you. The city has to extensively study EVERYTHING.

To my knowledge there was only one study, it compared using hybrid diesel electric buses and electric trolleybuses with auxiliary power units. The report found that here in Seattle, the trolleybuses were far and above the best option.

To be honest... the junctions are a problem that were figured out decades ago. The main issue is not that buses lose power as they roll through the junction but that drivers have to go though junctions and switches rather slowly (<5 mph) or they risk a dewirement. But that's where the APU's will come in handy. Right now, if a driver dewires, they typically stall out in the middle of the intersection where they have to get out in the middle of traffic and put the poles back up. With the APU, if the bus dewires, the driver can hit a switch to retract the poles, pull the bus to a safe area and then get out and rewire the bus.

The APU's will also allow Metro to do weekend maintenance without having to take all the trolleybuses out of service (which is what they currently do). Drivers can simply retract their poles, drive around the construction and rewire (hopefully with the help of a pole guide so the drivers don't have to get out of the bus).

It's also worth noting that while this was King County Metro's trolleybus order, they worked with San Francisco Muni on the specifications. Muni will exercising one of the options on the contract and will be getting 60 of the 60-foot XT60 trolleybuses.

I also don't see a lot of new cities being added to the trolleybus club. I love the trolleybuses here... but the overhead power system can be described as at best... unattractive. It would be politically challenging to install 70 miles of overhead wire in any city.
 
Isn't the entirely wholly new Trolleybus network a short one in Sweden linking the new out of town RR station to the city center? Can't remember which city it is.
 
Seattle will actually be adding some new trolleywire in the years to come. The city wants to add high capacity transportation to Madison Avenue which involves a huge hill climb. That has made it impossible to use light rail, impossible to use 60 foot buses and impossible to use diesel buses.

Frequent 40 foot trolleybuses are the only option.
 
rickycourtney said:
Seattle will actually be adding some new trolleywire in the years to come. The city wants to add high capacity transportation to Madison Avenue which involves a huge hill climb. That has made it impossible to use light rail, impossible to use 60 foot buses and impossible to use diesel buses.

Frequent 40 foot trolleybuses are the only option.
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Impossible to use diesel buses? Just how steep is that grade?
 
19% grade.

I guess it wouldn't be impossible to use diesel buses... just very impractical. The buses would struggle to get any speed up that hill. When the trolleybuses cant run that route usually uses Metro's series diesel electric hybrid buses (diesel generator creates power to run an electric motor). They have enough torque to get up the hills, but they're slower.
 
I guess you mean it's like the 22-Fillmore in San Francisco. Really steep grade on that one. One grade so steep, the 22 has to go around, even with the Skoda/ETI trackless trolleys.

These trackless trolleys are the same as the diesel XD40 transit buses except with different power. Don't know why it's called a XT40 instead of XE40.

Oh yeah, in Philadelphia, we called them trackless trolleys, not trolleybuses. Can't get rid of the habit.
 
rickycourtney said:
19% grade.

I guess it wouldn't be impossible to use diesel buses... just very impractical. The buses would struggle to get any speed up that hill. When the trolleybuses cant run that route usually uses Metro's series diesel electric hybrid buses (diesel generator creates power to run an electric motor). They have enough torque to get up the hills, but they're slower.
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Wow....that is indeed steep....much steeper than most of the mountain passes in Colorado, IIRC.....

If you got stopped on one of those, with a fully loaded Eagle, you had to burn the hell out of the clutch to get moving again with those old four-speeds.....
 
Swadian Hardcore said:
These trackless trolleys are the same as the diesel XD40 transit buses except with different power. Don't know why it's called a XT40 instead of XE40.
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I was wondering that too... apparently T is for electric trolleybus, E is battery electric.
Swadian Hardcore said:
Oh yeah, in Philadelphia, we called them trackless trolleys, not trolleybuses. Can't get rid of the habit.
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It seems to be an west coast/east coast thing. Seattle & San Francisco call them Trolleybuses, Philadelphia & Boston call them trackless trolleys. Dayton, OH calls them trolleybuses.
 
As a college student in Philly, I never had much reason to ride the trackless trolleys as they only operated in parts of the city that I had little reason

to visit. (Though of course I'd make sure to catch a ride on them once or twice a year for the fun of it.) But yeah, I definitely use "trackless trolley"

as opposed to trolleybus.
 
Here in Chicago (and despite not having them withing my lifetime) a trolley is a faux vintage streetcar on a school bus chassis for tourists or bachelorette parties and a trollybus was a bus with a pantograph.
 
I was confused because the new tracklesses that Philadelphia got were called New Flyer E40LFR even though they were not battery electric. I ought to give applause to New Flyer for their very successful products in the industry. They weren't always dominating the industry, their rise has been relatively recent. Rivals Gillig and NoveBus both don't produce tracklesses at this moment. New Flyer really dominates, and their products are good.
 
The city is really excited to get these buses out on the street. The trolleybuses run on some of the most heavily travelled urban routes. People are ready to stop climbing steps onto an unairconditioned bus.

New Flyer changed their naming conventions with the introduction of the Xcelsior. I think the thinking was that trolleybuses remain a niche market and more cities might buy a battery electric bus so best to save the prestigious "E" for that.

While Gillig doesn't directly build trolleybuses... they have helped build them. In addition to building the shells for Seattle's current 40 foot trolleybuses, the company recently delivered a few unpowered buses to Custom Coachworks, which then installed a trolleybus powertrain built by Kiepe Electric (the same company that builds the powertrain for New Flyer).
 
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I had a lot of fun working on this story:

KING 5: Seattle's new ride: the electric trolley prototype

SEATTLE – A fixture in the heart of the city is about to get a big upgrade and it could mean Seattle streets will be a lot quieter.

King County Metro Transit is currently testing out a 40-foot prototype that will replace aging electric trolley buses. Metro plans to initially buy 141 New Flyer trolleys. Eighty-six will be similar 40-footers in length, 55 will be the larger 60-foot vehicles.
Click to expand...
 

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