Most municipal
bus fleets have a fairly uniform paint job (well, except for those full-bus
screen printed
advertisements). When you ride around the
Washington, DC area, you get used to what a
Metrobus looks like. In
Roanoke, all the
Valley Metro busses have the
logo, the same color scheme, etc. In
Blacksburg, the
BT busses all have the same maroon and black stripes running down the sides.
But then one day, instead of the usual BT bus on the Tom's Creek A loop, a bus with a blue and yellow paint job and the word "pace" on the front is running. On the back, there's a number to call for service questions -- and it has an 847 area code in front of it! That's suburban Chicago, nowhere near where that bus actually is. Either something's strange, or that bus is really lost.
The reason for this great mystery is actually fairly simple. Transit agencies have to evaluate new types of busses for possible purchase somehow, and the best way to do that is to test drive a model on a local route. So they borrow busses from other agencies, either on their way to or from a manufacturer or just on a loan system. Thus, a Chicagoland bus appears in Blacksburg, Virginia for a day, or a DC Metrobus shows up in Roanoke. I imagine BT busses have been seen in some odd places before too.
Another in my series of BT nodes...