Odds and ends, 11/3/08

My youngest will be disappointed. The Cabell County Board of Education will entertain a motion tonight to sell 10 buses as surplus:

One of those buses is Number 564. It was manufactured by the now-defunct Wayne Corp. as a 1989 model. Wayne went out of the school bus business in or about 1992. We didn't know Cabell County had any Wayne buses left in its fleet until we were out at the bus garage one day in July. When Adam saw the bus, he had to get a photo. He's like that.

We didn't go into the garage area. Every so often, I have to take Adam to Barboursville so he can stand outside the fence and look at what buses are being worked on and what ones are out of daily service. He's that fascinated with those big yellow things. The hard part is when we have to climb to the top of the stadium at the middle school so he can look over the large fleeting area and see all the buses at once.

Anyway, Adam will probably be sad that Bus 564 will be sold before he has any chance of riding it. He's been on Blue Bird, Amtran and Thomas Built buses, but never a Wayne.

Below is a Wayne bus on a church parking lot in Gallipolis, Ohio. It's the one in the foreground. Behind it is a Thomas Built FS-65 model that was replaced by the C2. Adam and I are probably among the very few who care about this sort of thing, but when you have a kid with a passion, you try to nurture it.

UPDATE: Adam has also ridden a Ward. He has not ridden an International or an IC bus. But Ward became AmTran, AmTran became International and International rebranded its school buses as IC.

Also, he has not ridden a Carpenter or Superior bus, either.

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For what it's worth, Barack Obama did not say he was interested in putting coal companies in bankruptcy. He said utility companies would be free to build new coal-fired power plants under his cap-and-trade system, but any company attempting to do so would probably go into bankruptcy.


Either way, if the GOP had made hay of this sooner, they might have a better chance tomorrow.


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West Virginians enjoy cheap electricity. According to the federal Energy Information Administration, electricity costs an average of 5.04 cents per kilowatt hour in West Virginia. The only other state with a lower cost is Idaho, which gets most of its electricity from hydropower. There, the cost is about 4.92 cents.


The highest electricity costs in the lower 48 are in California and in New England. The highest is Massachusetts at 15.45 cents. There, electricity comes from a nearly even split among coal, natural gas and nuclear.