FENTON FILE

摘要

Whenever I read the Fleet in Focus feature in Buses, I am always drawn to the 'Most interesting vehicles' section. In the October 2020 Focus on Ellie Rose Travel of Hull, one of the vehicles listed under that heading was unique Reeve Burgess Riviera-bodied Quest 80 C-type A507 CUX, described as 'most troublesome' by author Andrew Jarosz. It would have been a sentiment shared by most other owners of Quests. The C-type was one of the worst of a bad bunch to emerge from Quest 80's Telford, Shropshire works in the 1980s. It had a rear, 6litre offside-mounted Ford 2726T turbocharged engine driving rearwards into an oil-filled chain and gear casing assembly that took the drive across the back of the chassis and then forward via a Ford six-speed gearbox into the rear axle, also of Ford manufacture. It was an arrangement that was noisy, inefficient and unreliable, with the fracturing of output shafts commonplace, caused by the sideways pull of the chain drive.