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From here on, I’ll refer to the bus in question at The Graduate.
One possibility for the builder plate found in The Graduate is that it was switched at the time of painting. It was common for a paint shop to prepare more than one bus for painting at a time. All the cosmetic parts would be removed along with the windows and doors, painted separately, and be put aside until the painting was complete and then replaced. One of the removed items would have been the builder plate. I’m sure it wasn’t a big priority when painting entire fleets to make sure every bus had the correct builder plate reattached. In fact, it could be tough to know which bus was which once they were painted unless you knew that Unit 2345 was suppose to have the builder plate for TDH4512-1674. The easiest answer to the question of what bus is parked at FTC would be the unit number matches the builder plate. The builder plate shows TDH4512-1675, which is the serial number for Unit 24. As it turns out we have access to a few of the retired CBS Old Looks so we started by figuring out what units were parked in the salvage yards. As luck would have it, Unit 24 was easily found sitting on the side of a hill with it’s unit number still inside above the front windshield. Unit 24 didn’t have a builder plate any more so we could check to see if it had been exchanged at one time with Unit 23. |
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| Looking through the Final Vehicle Record’s I noticed that each entry included a serial number for the transmission. At this point I returned to The Graduate to look for the transmission serial number. After scraping of what could have been decades worth of grit I found a data plate on the transmission. After returning home I referenced the records and found that the transmission serial number matched up with Unit 2630. Unit 2630 was purchased from M.K.&O. Transit Authority in Tulsa, OK. |
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So now it appeared that The Graduate wasn’t even from Santa Monica. Now what?
CBS owned 15 Old Look buses in its history, seven from the Green Bus Lines, 5 from Santa Monica, 2 from M.K.&O. and 1 from Cincinnati. Looking at each of these different fleets I found that they have distinguishing marks that separates them from each other. With this knowledge I was able to safely say that The Graduate was from the Santa Monica fleet which was a good sign. The distinguishing feature of the Santa Monica buses are the 6 vents on the roof. These allow fans mounted in the ceiling of the bus to exhaust the interior air in order to cool the bus on hot days. None of the other buses that CBS operated had these vents. It was obvious that Unit 26’s transmission made it’s way into The Graduate during its maintenance history. |
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| So with that discovery I could eliminate 10 of the Old Looks from the CBS roster as being possible replacements for The Graduate. Since Unit 24 was found lying in a field we could take it off the list of the possible buses bring the list down to 4 possible buses. Unit’s 21, 22, 23 and 25 were left. It seems that The Graduate could very well be Unit 23. |