Australasian Bus & Coach – May 2019

(^46) ABCMay 2019 busnews.com.au
Above:
Overall, the
DenAir Mono
is perfect in its
simplicity.
again, one of the privileges of
owning the company – and you
don’t get many – but one of
them is I can pick and choose, to
a degree, what bus I can drive.
I drive the Denning Landseer,
and I drive the Mono, and we
retired both for the same reasons
because they get too old, but
there was nothing wrong with
them, so we kept it obviously and
it’s gone into the heritage fleet.”
“It was originally a 49-seater,
with the same Denning Easy
Ride seats. We made it into a
57-seater with school bus seats.
But then we decided to keep it,
[so] we took the seats out and
put the Denning Easy Rides
back in.”
Amazingly, the Drivers had
stored the original seats and a
roll of the original seat fabric in
a storeroom, so they have taken
it back to exactly how it looked
when they first purchased it.
THE TEST
Denning had an outstanding
reputation for the durability
and ruggedness of its vehicles
and this came from the intense
testing its engineers did in
the harsh Australian outback
Listening to the GM
Detroit engine run there
is arguably no other that
has the sound like this
one has.
TOP APPOINTMENTS
In their time the Dennings were
luxurious vehicles and Driver
explains that the Mono has all bar
one usual luxury included.
“Probably the only inclusion
missing from the day is the toilet,
otherwise it had everything
that Denning was putting into
a bus. And we really got it with
everything, but deliberately not
the toilet. We were sticklers for
getting our 49 seats.
“Eventually we went to the
48 and the toilet, but we didn’t
in those days, but it was just all
the Denning features, it just had
everything you could get and it
was great.”
So any restoration to the
Mono over the years, or is it as
purchased?
DRIVEN DENNING DENAIR MONO