MAN Americana

[jajuan]

Yeah, I recall these MAN Americana 4000s. My very worst and the very least favorite transit bus of all-time. These buses looked like a brick or shoebox on wheels or whatever you want to call them. Destinations either never worked or too hard to read. The engines sounded like a school bus. I seen the first time in 1986. I rode them just get from A to B or C or where ever. I'm glad that CTA retired them. I'll take a Neoplan before the MAN Americana. I'll took a few photos of them just please and share with others.  

To respond to your complaint about the destination signs never working or being to hard to read, personally I rarely experienced the situation of the signs not working at all until it was close to retirement time for these buses. I would attribute this to CTA's neglect of these buses once the expansion of accessibility began during 2001 and 2002 with the arrival of the Novas. In my experience with riding these buses, sure the signs may have been hard to read from time to time but I always new what route I was getting even on the multiple route stops including thoses downtown. Once the Novas started coming, it was like CTA decided to stop the upkeep of the Americanas. They stopped fixing the destination signs and started with those tacky paper signs on the windshield. You started to see rust in the outer frame of some. It even got so bad, that a lot of the Americanas still in service went unwashed for days sometimes weeks at a time. The Americanas held up very well during their service life with the CTA, but they seem to get a bad rap from the neglect the CTA should these buses during their last couple of years in service.

Overall most of the breakdowns I experienced during the service years of the Americanas were not with the Americanas but were with some of the other models. As a matter of fact, I saw more breakdowns from the Flxibles (both 5300s and 6000s) and the TMCs. This was especially true of Kedzie garage. Plus you still see large numbers of destination sign malfunctions including with the newly installed LED signs on the 6000s and the signs on both the Novas and NABIs and these are supposed to be newer buses therefore in theory give better performance than the Americanas.