Quote:
Originally Posted by JesuitLarson
It's a 1994 with a 3116 Caterpillar front-engine. 40 passenger but the seats aren't like school bus seats, only 2 people per seat with high backs. The bus has A/C and seller says it works. It has 237,000 miles on it though. Is this too high mileage?
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That sounds (and looks) like a TC2000, best as I can tell from the seller's poor photography. Can you pop him an e-mail and ask if it says "TranShuttle" above the rear bumper? It seems to be set up as a suburban transit, not a skoolie. This is a GOOD thing: A/C, highway gearing, MT643 instead of the AT545, storage space, better seats, maybe a stereo, quite likely rear air suspension. Set up as a skoolie, that would probably be about a 66-passenger, meaning it's a fullsize bus.
The 3116 Cat is the 3126 and C7's baby brother (nothing like the massive 3406 semi truck engine)...6.6 litres, not a bad engine. I'd rather have a 5.9 Cummins, but would be fine with a 3116.
My only concern would be the transmission with 237K...I know the MT643 is plenty tough, but 15 years and a quarter-million miles can kill one if neglected or overheated. If the fluid is clean & red, I wouldn't give it a second thought.
Also, a 1994 probably won't have it, but later TC's (the one I drove was a late-199
used a bizarre electronic dash cluster. It had a speedo, a tach, a digital bar-graph air gauge (which also had the odometer display), and one central gauge with a switch to cycle it between fuel, volts, oil pressure, and temp. All in all, a pretty weird design, and extremely cranky. I wouldn't pass up a bus with that setup (BB's are excellent buses), but would certainly figure on adding aftermarket gauges for oil, volts, engine temp, transmission temp, and probably air pressure.
It may well have a tilt & telescoping column...BB has it set up backward compared to almost everyone else: you PUSH the lever to tilt it and PULL it to telescope it.