Photo of the Week - Week 49:
Donnybrook's spare Coastal Tours bus, Alexander ALX400 bodied Volvo B7TL, AV398, is seen awaiting its departure time at its Pearse Street terminus on the 9th December 2010.
AV398 is one of 3 closed top ALX400 buses in Tours livery, all of which are operated out of Donnybrook. It is generally spare, AX542 and AX543, being the principle operators of the Coast and Castle and South Coast tour. However AV398 does operate tours when required, thus its never assigned to certain route(s), which would be the case for many of Donnybrook's buses. It floats around and finds itself on a wide assortment of Donnybrook's routes during a week's work. The same could be said for AX542 and AX543 which are often to be found on various Donnybrook routes after their day's work on the Tours.
AV398 was delivered in Core livery but was painted into the new tours livery in early 2008. It was delivered in 2004 as part of the batch AV396-398 which were equipped with extra luggage racks for use on the recently withdrawn Airport - Dun Laoghaire 746 service. Upon painting into Tours livery these luggage racks were removed and fitted to AV395, which was then allocated to Route 746. AV398 had the distinction of being the first AV into the new two-tone green tour colours.
In the past week DublinbusStuff has caught up with the vehicle on two occasions, both by chance. As shown above it was assigned to Route 47, Pearse Street to Belarmine, on Thursday, while today (Sunday) it was to be found on Route 14.
AV398 is seen operating a Route 14 service from Dundrum to Parnell Square on the Broadford Road on the 12th December 2010.