HS Helsinki An Italian bus advises how to buy an HSL ticket – how did the decommissioned bus end in Rome?

Roman There are buses on the streets with familiar Finnish instructions on how to buy a ticket. However, a ticket purchased in Rome in accordance with the instructions is not valid, as the instructions apply to Helsinki Region Transport (HSL) tickets.

The bus also has stickers in Finnish that indicate the location of the emergency exit and the fact that the bus has a recording camera.

All in all, the bus in Rome has therefore operated on the HSL route in the past.

Joona Packalen From HSL’s communications, think that it could be an old bus from the bus company Nobina.

Also Nobina’s traffic director Mårten Winqvist considers it possible that the company has previously operated a bus with labels in Finnish in Rome.

“Nobina operates in Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The company has a joint fleet management company in the Nordic countries that resells decommissioned buses, ”says Winqvist.

“Nobina has sold used buses to a Hungarian and Estonian company, but has not sold buses directly to Italy. It is possible that the Hungarian or Estonian company resold the buses purchased from Nobina to Italy. ”

So you can see the familiar HSL blue buses in surprising places. The public transport forum published last October picture, where a bus, possibly in HSL colors, operates in the Moldovan capital, Chisinãu.

The sticker in Finnish says that the bus has camera surveillance. Photo: Emilie Calmettes / Reader photo

Winqvist says Nobina sells dozens of buses out of service every year.

“The number of buses for sale depends on the changes that have taken place in the operation of bus routes as a result of the tender. In recent years, with the growing number of electric buses, a huge amount of new buses have been purchased. As a result, more buses have been decommissioned and resold. ”

When the bus is resold, the labels of HSL and Nobina are removed.

“An error has occurred. For one reason or another, the interior stickers have not been removed, ”says Wiqvist, referring to the bus described in Rome.

Buses operating on HSL’s routes also move abroad due to the fact that buses in the HSL area have an age requirement, ie at some point the bus must always be replaced.

“Buses operating on HSL’s routes have also moved abroad when an operator called Transdev stopped operating in Finland at the beginning of 2020,” says HSL’s Communications Packalen.