There's always going to be issues with allocations of buses with route branding, especially when things go wrong within the branded fleet.

It's not just unique with Ashington depot either, Belmont seemed to be struggling with their Sapphire allocations today, the three spares they have all got deployed on the 22 and 24 this morning but unfortunately 1523 still appears to be missing, so with that missing and the three spares filling in on other Sapphire services the 7 ended up with Sapphire 6 branded 1531 today. A Sapphire 24 E400 also popped up on the 6. I think (I may be wrong) that one of the Sapphire 6 E400's developed a fault this morning. At around 14:30 a Sapphire 6 Pulsar got taken off the 6 and replaced with Lowlander 7439 probably because there was no other suitable replacement.

Another depot with similar issues to Ashington depot is Darlington depot, we have frequent missing branded buses from the MAX X26/X27 and X66/X67 services with standard specification buses having to fill in, often a Pulsar or Solo which don't have WiFi has to be used in place of a Omnicity, hopefully this will happen less now 1406 and the three Omnicitys for the X75/X76 are back from MAX refurbishment. Similar story for the Sapphire 7 as well.