An old English double-decker passenger bus that once was reborn as a fish-and-chips food truck in Bangor is getting fixed up in Ellsworth.
Left for more than 20 years in a field next to Route 166 in the Hancock County town of Penobscot, the bus has been towed to a residential property in Ellsworth where it is being converted into a home office by its new owners.
Chris Rotta said he is making the old bus into a workspace for his wife, Melissa Nute Rotta, who works from home. Her grandfather, John Nute, operated the bus in eastern Maine in the 1990s as an English-style food truck.
“It’s a hunk of metal and wood, but it’s a piece of history,” Chris Rotta said. “I’m going to turn it into an office for her.”
Rotta has created a Facebook page for the bus called “The Real Thing,” which was the name of the bus during its food truck era.
“A few years ago we discovered its location and with some effort have brought her to her new home and over a long period will make her whole again,” Rotta wrote on the site.
Since moving the bus to his property, Rotta has rebuilt the back boarding platform and the stairs that lead to the upper deck. He’s replaced exterior panels and has repaired the roof, and recently was looking for a replacement tire that would fit the bus’ large rim.
Rotta said that while he is trying to save and restore the structure and appearance of the bus, he is not looking to make it road ready. The cost of replacing the engine parts it needs to be driven around again would be too high, he said.
“It would be cheaper for us to buy another used one and bring it over” from England, he said.
That is exactly how the immobile bus in his yard got to Maine in the first place. But it wasn’t his grandfather-in-law who imported the vehicle. It was Sanford “Sonny” Miller, a Bangor businessman who owned and operated Miller’s Restaurant on Main Street for decades.
In addition to the restaurant founded by his father, Miller also owned and operated the shorter-lived Red Lion, an English-style pub in Bangor. Miller bought the bus and had it shipped to Bangor from England in the 1970s so he could use it to promote the pub.
After the Red Lion closed, the bus was donated by Miller to the city of Bangor, which for a few years used it as a shuttle between city parking and the Bangor State Fair.
The bus kept breaking down, however, and then “languished in the public works yard for several years,” according to a 1990 Bangor Daily News article. Nute bought it that year from the city for $1,000, the article said.
Rotta said he’s discovered an online community of double-decker bus enthusiasts, some of whom have given him valuable advice about how to restore the structure and track down information about its history when it was still in use in England. He said he’s also gotten a lot of feedback from Mainers who remember it being parked outside the Red Lion or seeing it at Maine fairs selling fish and chips.
He said he does not have a deadline for finishing the project, but he gets a lot of encouragement and occasionally some volunteer help.
“Holy Hannah — there’s a ton of people that remember eating out of that thing,” he said. “The bones are there. It’s not as bad as it actually looks.”
