Tag Archives: New Flyer C40LF

Bus Photo of the Month: July 2024

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New Flyer C40LF C-27

Location: Grand Canyon Visitors Center, Grand Canyon Village, Arizona
Operator of Vehicle: Paul Revere Transportation, L.L.C.
Date of Photo: August 20, 2019

If I were to ask you what entity in the United States operated nearly 800 transit vehicles carrying over 26.6 million passengers during 2022, would you think of the National Park Service?  The National Park Service operates transit services for a variety of reasons at many of its facilities across the country, such as to provide mobility to or within a park or for interpretive tours.  These services are provided through a combination of concession contracts, service contracts, or cooperative agreements.

The South Rim Shuttle Service at the Grand Canyon provides transportation to and within one of the most visited NPS units in the entire country.  The fleet of about 30 CNG powered buses is owned by the National Park Service and the actual operation is managed and run by Boston based Paul Revere Transportation, L.L.C. under a contract that currently runs through November 2030.  The South Rim Shuttle Service has been in operation since 1974 and prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, approximately 7.5 million people used the shuttle buses each year.  In 2022, there were over 4.4 million boardings, making it the third busiest “transit system” in the National Park Service’s portfolio.  The NPS transit services carried nearly 46 million passengers in 2019 prior to the pandemic, so like many other transit systems in the United States and around the world, ridership is still recovering from the impact of Covid.  

Have you been on any of the 80-plus transit systems within the National Park Service’s inventory?  If you aren’t sure, you can see the complete list of systems and their characteristics in Appendix D (starting on page 45) of the 2022 NPS National Inventory System List.

For more photos of shuttle buses at the Grand Canyon, please click here.  

Bus Photo of the Month: March 2024

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New Flyer C40LF 259

Location: Brooklyn Avenue and St. Marks Place, Brooklyn, NY
Operator of Vehicle: MTA New York City Transit
Date of Photo: February 26, 2024

The New Flyer Low Floor bus model was the cornerstone of New Flyer Industries’ product line for nearly 30 years.  The model was introduced in 1991 after a Dutch bus model, Den Oudsten’s B86 Low Floor, was adapted for the North American market.  Ultimately, the New Flyer Low Floor would be available in 30, 35, 40, and 60 foot lengths and with CNG, diesel, diesel-electric hybrid, electric (trolleybus), hydrogen fuel cell, gasoline-electric hybrid, hydrogen electric hybrid, and LNG variants.  The New Flyer Low Floor was available commercially through the 2010 model year, having effectively been replaced by the “restyled” New Flyer Low Floor model starting in 2006.  However, when New York City Transit wished to purchase a large order of new CNG buses despite the original Low Floor line being discontinued, an additional four orders of C40LFs were manufactured for the United States’s largest transit agency.  One of those buses is pictured here.

For more photos of MTA New York City Transit’s C40LF buses, please click here.  

Bus Photo of the Month: April 2019

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New Flyer C40LF 2302

New Flyer C40LF 2302

Location: 16th Street, NW at Q Street, Washington, DC
Operator of Vehicle: Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA)
Date of Photo: July 19, 2007

It may be April Fool’s Day, but this is no April Fool’s Joke!  If you’re familiar with DC area bus assignments, you’ll know that C40LF buses were never assigned to Northern Division, the longtime home of the S2 route.  I also don’t photoshop my photos in that way.  So what’s the deal here?  Sometimes in a pinch, a bus from a “foreign” division gets put in to service on a route in order to maintain service in the event of a service interruption.  For transit fans and those who enjoy taking photos of unusual circumstances, coming across an instance such as this is quite fun, as it allows for taking photos that are really hard to come by.  To my knowledge, this is the only time a C40LF was documented as operating on this route during their service lives.  So even though it is April 1st and perhaps not everything on the internet is believable today, don’t forget to take a second look.  Sometimes, the unexpected is still legitimate.

For more photos of WMATA’s New Flyer C40LF buses, please click here.