National Express West Midlands is working to make old buses greener

From left to right: Tom Taylor, Jack Hardwick, Mark Moore and Simon Ellis (copyright: National Express)

“Travelling by bus is a much healthier way to move people around than using private cars. A bus engine is only four times bigger than a car engine but a bus can carry 75 people inside – taking about 50 cars off the road,” said Tom Stables, Managing Director of National Express West Midlands. “We have nearly 1600 buses servicing the West Midlands. We are working closely with bus manufacturers, central government and Birmingham City Council to explore all the new technology that’s becoming available to make our vehicles even cleaner and greener.

“All the new buses we’ve bought for the last two years have had the greenest engines on the market. What with these new buses, and retrofitting the older ones, 60% of our fleet now operates to the two highest European emission standards – making the air in the West Midlands cleaner and healthier.”

It takes two engineers around six hours to fit this new greener technology, which consists of a filter and a selective catalytic reduction (SCR) ‘trap’ with AdBlue injection being fitted to each bus. When this is completed the harmful emissions coming out of the exhaust are reduced by as much as 96 per cent.

This makes the air coming out of the exhaust cleaner than the air in the city outside.

To find out more about how this is done, see this video below showing engineers retrofitting the SCR traps, courtesy of National Express West Midlands…