Notes

I think I’m not alone when I say that this isn’t the best picture I’ve ever posted, but CJSutcliffe said that he had no experience with current MAN buses since MAN does not deliver complete buses to Great Britain.

This bus, slowly moving through the pedestrian precinct, is an MAN A21. A version with a very slight facelift is now sold as MAN Lion’s City, due to the Logo of MAN, which stands for Machine works Augsburg Nürnberg/Nuremberg, being the Lion of Braunschweig/Brunswick, even though the buses come from nearby Salzgitter. It’s an interesting story (not really) which I might tell you some other time if you cared (which you don’t).

The entire family pre- and post-facelift is often called Lion’s City, due to it being a much nicer name than the bunch of alphanumeric gum you’d have to throw together otherwise. It’s MAN’s second generation of low-floor bus and as such directly competes against the Mercedes-Benz Citaro. Interestingly, there’s also a double-decker version of the Lion’s City, which is mainly seen in Berlin. Modern Neoplan city buses ride on the same platform and share quite a lot of the exterior. You don’t see this type of bus a lot in Aachen, but Goslar (being rather close to Salzgitter) is more fond of them. However, Goslar doesn’t have a lot of money, so the conversion to low-floor operation is far from complete here and probably won’t be for some time.