Posted on 03/05/2013 4:43:18 PM PST by nascarnation
Sadly, at least two bus drivers in Iowa had to learn the hard way that street racing school buses with elementary school children on board "is never a good idea," losing their jobs in the process. According to reports, one driver decided to pass the one in front on a snowy day in February while schlepping the kids back from a Valentine's Day activity. The kids cheered, for a little while at least, until they realized that the other driver wasn't slowing down to let their bus overtake.
According to school officials, the bus driver who attempted the errant pass on wintry roads was fired immediately, while the other driver was given time to explain his actions claiming that he had the bus in cruise control and simply didn't slow down before being fired a short time later.
(Excerpt) Read more at autoblog.com ...
LOL once they hit 40mph what’s to stop them from going all the way up to 42?
They had to start braking for the school entrance, LOL.
As I remember it, the brakes were as weak as the acceleration.
We used to have a lot of slightly banked curves on the dirt roads around where I grew up. We had drivers who would goose it around the turns and slide the bus.
When I was a first-grader in rural Virginia, my school bus was driven by a fifteen-year old high-school student.
He was the son of our landlord, and racing other school buses on the 12-mile trip to school every day was only one of the amusing things he did with us all riding in the back.
I still remember that big, long, bent gearshift handle sticking up out of the floor. It’s transmission sounded like that of a bread truck.
The good old days.
You probably played with balls of mercury from broken thermometers too.
Hard to believe we’re still alive, isn’t it?
Yup.
I had a toy steam engine, purchased from the Sears-Roebuck catalog. It's boiler was heated by an electric element.
When it burned out, I took it apart to replace the nichrome helix with one my father procured for me from his place of employment.
When I got it apart, I found that the element lay in a ceramic maze under a bed of cotton-like asbestos fibers.
I played with the asbestos before replacing it.
Unfortunately, the new heating element burned out very quickly. My dad and I didn't understand the concept of "ohms per unit length." Ah well.
I'm still here. Recent chest X-ray was pronounced "clear."
Coming in February 2014 the 'Daytona 50' School Bus race...
Carl Edwards said he will drive a FORD school Bus and do a backflip if he wins...
On a much more amateur level, school bus racing is done here in Indianapolis.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFy3-2pMvDY
This incident is known to the students riders as “The best school bus trip ever!”
Lol.
From the 1st to 5th grades I went to a 2 room school 60 miles west of Phoenix, Arizona.
My friends and I always made sure we sat in the last row of that long old school bus because there was a pretty steep, but short, drop-off in the graded dirt road on the way to school.
The bus driver always had a good amount of speed going when he went down over that drop-off, and from the rear seat, you got a momentary thrill of weightlessness.
Ah yes, cheap thrills.
You probably played with balls of mercury from broken thermometers too.
Hard to believe were still alive, isnt it?
That mercury really made the dimes and nickels of that era shiny, for sure.
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