Brokedown in Vineland

So we were tooling around the bypass at Syracuse with not a care between us, on our way to supper with Will Sill and his wife in Tunkhannock. The bypass comes back onto 81 via a steep, narrow, single lane on-ramp. About halfway up the ramp I had to drop a gear because we seemed to be running out of power. I glanced in the mirror as I went to make the shift and saw smoke at the exhaust. As I pushed the clutch the engine died. When I touched the starter nothing happened. Sez I to myself "Self - this is not good". Then I sweated my way to the top of the ramp incline. Fortunately we crested the incline although just barely and then we started back down towards 81. We eventually rolled to a steaming stop just onto 81.


We got out the flares, put on the flashers, generally made things secure and then tried to do some basic troubleshooting. Obviously we had overheated but the reason wasn't so immediately clear. This old girl has used a bit of water ever since we bought it. By "a bit" I mean something in the order of 3 or 4 gallons annually. I would occasionally think "I should check that rad" and discover that it took a lot of coolant to bring it back up. But there was never even a trace of glycol in the oil samples so I never worried about the loss. In hindsight I expect what was happening is that the o-rings on the liners had been previously cooked and were letting a bit of water out the exhaust ports. When I added coolant I was likely often ending up with an air pocket in the system that would further exacerbate the cooked o-ring situation. Too late now to worry about that now - it was a combination of previous owner abuse and current owner neglect that led us to the sorry state we are presently in.


We spent the weekend in a hotel in a place called Cortland, about 30 miles south of Syracuse. After we let everything cool down and I tracked down some coolant we refilled the rad and ran another 30 miles Friday night. We blew prodigious clouds of steam on startup and for about the first 2 miles but then the fog cleared and we ran more or less clean down to Cortland which was really our first opportunity to get off the road without turning around and going back to Syracuse.


I talked to a variety of mechanics and busnuts about our situation. Ultimately our options came down to letting the local yokels pull wrenches and hang parts on an engine that they clearly knew nothing about or getting the hell out of Dodge on the hook of a wrecker. So I called Luke at US Coach in Vineland. Luke is a legend in the bus community. He has been fixing busses for 35+ years and is known across North America. He and Don Fairchild out in California are without question the two premiere 2-stroke diesel shops in North America. As it turned out Luke was also about 300 miles from where we were broke down.


Now here's the part that I can't understand. On Luke's recommendation I called Flanagans Towing and got a quote to move us to Vineland. They came back at $950 plus tolls. Ultimately that turned out to be a total of $1010 to tow us to Vineland. I would have thought seriously about driving the half ton on a round trip of 600 miles let alone supplying a monstrous boom lift wrecker and the fuel to tow this old Prevost 300 miles but that's what they did. Steve Flanagan himself turned out to be our tow operator and he was a true pro. We were well looked after and were in Vineland in Luke's yard less than 12 hours after I originally called Luke.


On Tuesday the guys here pulled the bus into Luke's shop and started pulling pieces off. It wasn't until yesterday afternoon (Weds) that we knew for sure what the problem was and it was only this morning that I got an estimate of the total repair bill. My stupidity is going to cost us something north of $11k but we will have essentially a brand new engine with 100% Detroit parts inside it. It turns out that there were a lot of jobber parts in this engine, although that alone isn't necessarily a bad thing. I have always suspected that this engine was a truck engine transplanted into a bus and Luke confirmed today that is the case. We're getting a few other little items attended to at the same time and the guys here swear that we will be out the door before Christmas.


Tonight we are going to drive down to Washington and spend a couple of nights there. I've got some people that I want to see there and Marilyn is going to make like a tourist for two days. I'll join her in the Smithsonian on Saturday and then we'll drive back up here. I've got an appointment with a grease gun underneath this beast on Sunday when I won't be in the way of Bill Sr. & Jr.

Never a dull moment. And I thought our big problem was going to be getting out of the snowbank west of Ottawa.