It's hard to think this photo taken in Marburg of a Setra S215HD coach visiting from Hamburg with my friend Marion coming up behind was taken in the early Eighties. As elsewhere coach design reached a kind of peak before we started getting the humpback racing greyhound look and some might not like brightwork but to me it looks like a bit of welcoming icing on the cake just finishing it off nicely. Who wants political correctness in design on the streets anyway when buses should entice us still like children!
You are right, this is an extremely neat and attractive livery on an extremely attarctive vehicle.
ReplyDeleteNow that this generation of Setras, and indeed this style of livery is on its way out I regret not having payed more attention to them.
I lived in Geramny for three years and saw quite a few of them. I think I never photographed onw though.
But somehow the independent coach and travel operators lacked the glamour of the municipal fleets or large regional operators. Coach travel in Germany was (and probably still is) very much a thing for old ladies. Very often such trips were combined with some sort of marketing activities which subsidised the fares to ridiculously low levels, provided you agreed to listen to some dodgy guy rant on about the advantages of an automaic onion slicer for an hour. The euphemism for this was "Kaffeefahrt". As the clients were mostly pensioners who probably participated more out of boredom than interest, the attitudes of staff and quality of the publicity material were on that level. You often got treated as if you weren't totally sane or had one foot in the grave. I think this permanently conditioned my knee-jerk unease on any privately owned and liveried Setra.
Andrew, I'm surprised my Setra has provoked suck strong opinions of German Society but I know what you mean. This example is quite smart but some of these zany coaches look like little Kitsch Palaces of the road with their plastic flowers and Heino playing sweetly in the background. I have to say I have plenty of them as I like all the different liveries names and numberplates.
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