This site is for public transportation enthusiasts who are interested in various types of public transportation agencies in the Delaware Valley region.
SEPTA has started listing the Proterras for Sale on Govdeals.
These buses were sidelined back in 2020 due to cracking in the bus chassis and other defects, including poor performance and insufficient battery range. The buses sit at Southern for several years until they were moved to Midvale. Earlier this year, a major fire broken out at Midvale scrap yard due to the batteries on one caughting on fire.
https://www.govdeals.com/en/asset/688/10293
SEPTA’s PCCs haven’t ran on the G1 nee route 15 in several weeks. These last ran during the first week of June then suddenly stopped running in revenue service. The cause is these are up for state inspection and these normally get inspected at Woodland. For them to travel from Callowhill to Woodland, they need to use the diversion route (40th Street). Up until recently work was being done on this route and is now completed and now the state inspections have resumed. Hopefully these will return back into service soon.
On June 6, Midvale scrap yard, used for storing decommished buses, experienced a fire. The cause of the fire was the battery unit of an Proterra bus which caught on fire. As reported back in December, these buses were moved from Southern to this lot. Thankfully no injuries were reported. 40 buses in total were damanged as result.
More Recently, most of the buses which were located near the Proterras were relocated away. To prevent further contamination, sand or dirt was placed around these buses.
On Friday, May 30th, SEPTA debuted several fuel cell buses of their fleet of 10 buses. These fuel cell buses are quite similar in appearance to the buses which are already in service. These were ordered back in 2023 when the SEPTA Board approved a contract for the purchase of 10 fuel cell electric buses (FCEBs) made by New Flyer.
As reported last year, these buses arrived on the property and since underwent acceptance and training. Also temporary infrastructure has been installed at Midvale to accommodate for the fuel cell/Hydrogen technology. There were rumors floating out there that these initially failed acceptance tests but rest assured these are now being slowly phased into service.
The Fuel Cell buses are apart of SEPTA’s clean air initiatives. These buses are assigned out of the Midvale district and are expected to operate on the route 23. Thus far, several buses (703, 704, 708) has been spotted in revenue service. The fleet numbers for the entire order are 700-709 – so be on the look out.
The majority, if not all, of the Proterra electric buses operated by SEPTA have been sent to the Midvale Scrap Yard. These buses were plagued by a series of persistent issues since their initial deployment in 2019. In early 2020, these were sidelined and never entered full revenue service.
Problems encountered with the Proterra fleet included:
It’s unknown what the long term fate of these will be but rest assure these will not go back into service any time soon. There were some rumors or speculation going around that some of these would be overhauled however I wouldn’t count on them. It would be interesting to see what gets earmarked into SEPTA’s FY 2027 Captial budget moving forth.
So recently I have been digging through some of my older files and found a responsitory of older SEPTA Annual Service plans for the ones which I have available. These date back to 1996 to 2021.
Anyways since SEPTA has cancelled this year’s holiday event. I wanna share my collection of photos. These were taken back in 2017.
It comes as no surprise that the SEPTA Holiday bus event is not happening this year. SEPTA posted on social media that this is due to the budget shortfall. Yet again the shortfall claimed another annual event. The first major event which was cancelled was the rail rodeo cancelled back in October. Hopefully next year when or if SEPTA gets funding, these events would be held once again. But for now we can only hope that cooler heads would prevail in Harrisburg.
As of today here is the current status of the new bus deliveries being diligently tracked by the transit enthusiast community.
Here is the current retirements:
On 12/1/2018, it marked the last time when the AEM7 and ALP44 last ran in service.
