The Twin Cities’ fleet of purple buses should all be back on the street next week, fresh from repairs.

Three of four Blue Bird Corp. buses running routes around Lewiston-Auburn are back on the street this week with repaired front ends. A fourth bus should be back on the road by Tuesday, according to Don Bedford, maintenance supervisor for Western Maine Transportation.

Maintenance workers at Western Maine Transportation pulled four of Citylink’s Blue Bird buses off of the road in June to work their front ends.

“We pulled one of the Blue Birds in because we had a concern with the front-end ball joints,” Bedford said. “We decided to pull the other three to check and found other problems, not with the ball joints but with the tie rods and what not. Rather than put them back on the street, we decided to pull them from the routes and get them squared away.”

The company operates the Citylink system for Lewiston and Auburn, as well as the Mountain Explorer service in Bethel. Bedford said the company was able to substitute buses from the Bethel service while Lewiston-Auburn’s buses were in the shop.

“We have the Sugarloaf buses on site anyway, since they’re not used in the summer, and we were able to put them in service so the L-A system could keep their runs going,” he said. “We were very fortunate, and it’s a nice thing to have those buses in our pocket.”

Repairs to the four Citylink buses were complicated by getting parts. All four are 2006 Blue Bird-brand buses, and each relied on a specific part manufactured by an Italian company.

“But we found out, and so did Blue Bird, that the factory closed for an entire month in the summer,” Bedford said. “That kept us from getting the parts at all.”

Western Maine will keep the Mountain Explorer buses on hand until October, when the service in Bethel begins running again. The Lewiston Auburn Transportation Center is expecting the delivery of a new bus in the next month.

“So we should be back up to full strength very quickly,” he said.