(23 Jan 2016, 3:56 pm)Cock Robin wrote You're the one who's trying to be clever. And not just with me either. You're talking out your a*se. Why test a bus if its only been tested a month before just cos that's the date the bus that's withdrawn was due for test? So if you then transfer it to another depot do you change the date and do it early again. Waste of money when there's other things they could be spending it on.

Each bus has to be tested every year, so these have to be spread across the year at each depot. You usually lose a bus for a week for preparation - test day at Stockton is on a Wednesday which usually sees one of our own, plus a vehicle from Redcar and two from Darlington all having MOT tests.

There are only around 50 weeks available to MOT test vehicles - with a fleet size of around 70 at Stockton, this means one or two are done each week. This means it has to be spread across the fleet so that we don't end up with 10 vehicles off in one week. I'd presume (I'm not 100%) that this means vehicles coming in will take the dates of vehicles leaving the fleet, to keep the yearly spread as close as possible to what it always has been.