Howard Transit Gillig Phantoms?

[Scrabbleship]

This morning while watching the news, all the DC stations (and I'd assume Baltimore too) sent their choppers to cover a car/Howard Trasnit bus crash in Elkridge. Instead of a cutaway or the new Gillig hybrids, the bus in this crash was a mostly-white Gillig Phantom with Howard Transit stickers on it, looked like a 35'.

Though the 5 people in the car thankfully have non-life threatening injuries and the driver and lone passenger of the Gillig weren't hurt (thanks WMAR), I'm curious about when Howard Transit began buying secondhand Gilligs. This has to be a recent development, wasn't it all cutaway until earlier this year.

I'm sorry if I sound petty and insensitive, but a sighting is a sighting. 

[Tristan]

Sheesh I haven't been up there in about a year now, how much you miss.  I'm willing to bet you they're just having cutaway maintenance issues (specifically, the issue is that they HAVE cutaways in the first place...) and First Transit had to bring some buses in to compensate.

One of the few good things about having a contractor, especially a large contractor, is that they "got your back" if you start to have equipment problems, assuming that the contract properly includes liquidated damages for missed pull-outs, trips, or road calls -- basically, they can get penalized financially by the contract administrator if they fail to keep the buses on the road, so they'll do everything they can to make sure that doesn't happen...remember the weird Orion Vs and old RTSes that Connector had a couple years back?  Those were spare buses that Yellow/Connex had, I think in some sort of reserve fleet, that could be deployed when things like this happen.

But, that's all just a guess.