School bus prices at auction today

[dburt]

Went to a very big farm auction today. The farmer had a rather large fleet of farm trucks to haul 'taters, sugar beets, wheat etc during harvest time. A couple of years ago he had bought 4 surplus school buses from the local school district for the engine and transmissions that he could put in some of his older farm trucks. He never did get around to swapping out the drive trains from the buses, so today they were part of the auction. For some reason all the buses were 1988 models.

Bus #1 was an front engine IH with a 9.0L IH V-8 diesel engine with an Allison auto and Thomas body. The bus was showing about 125,000 miles and it had a wheel chair lift in the back with a big curb side door for the lift. It was about a 66 passenger size medium bus.

The other 3 buses were front engine Fords, all with the Ford 6.6L (?) small 6-cylinder 160HP diesel engines with Allison auto transmission. The varied in miles from 116,000 showing (but with a replaced speedo) to 230,000 miles. They had Ward bodies and were medium size- approx 66 passenger size.

One guy bought all four buses and paid $2,000 each. I thought that was a little bit high, since they don't seem to bring that much when the schools auction them off.

Just thought some off you might like to know the going prices out here in SE Oregon.

[Mark R. Obtinario]

I would not have paid more than $2k for the four of them.

The IHC 9.0L is a real boat anchor of an engine--no real power, smokes a lot, was never turbo'ed, and likes to leak oil worse than a DD 2-cycle.

The Ford 6.6L is an offshore engine that I think came from Brazil. It isn't a bad engine but just try to get parts for one. It would be almost cheaper to purchase another bus with a Cummins 'B'-series in it for a donor than to try and fix it.

And as for a Ward body bus, at one time they were an okay cheap bus. But by the late 80's they defined cheap--fit and finish were not terms you could put in the same sentence with Ward bodies.

[Rudy]

So he gets home and says "look honey, I got four buses for cheap."

She say, "how much?"

He says, "2000 for each"

She says, "YOU DUM DUM!" Haven't you ever gone to the Sharkey website?"

[Dennis The Bus Dweller]