(26 Apr 2017, 8:45 am)RBZ 5459 wrote They've ordered all depots to only wash 4 days out of 7, to save over a grand a week apparently....

Interior cleans are contracted out to ISS, though, so these should still be getting done every night, with the Angels and Crook buses having a full valet every few weeks on a cycle. The latter point is why so many buses from Chester-le-Street have been working from Crook over the past few months. 6134/35 were both on loan to Crook recently and it's because the ISS cycle had 695 and 696 down for a full valet at the same time. If Ambassador has reported this to Go North East, I'm sure they'll be able to look into why that bus wasn't cleaned last night.

An exterior wash every other day isn't too bad during the summer months, but when it's still poor weather conditions, it's down to the discretion of the Depot Engineer to wash externally more regularly, in order to maintain the desired quality standards.

Depending on that depot's engineering budget for the month, I imagine the external cleanliness of buses is a cost vs benefit scenario, which is possibly why you notice different levels of external cleanliness depending on the depot. You see differing standards of quality at almost every bus depot, regardless of the operator... Using Arriva as an example - two similarly sized depots are Jesmond and Stockton. Jesmond stands out to me as being one of the poorer ones, with Stockton being one of the better ones. At the same time; I bet Jesmond's fleet has a higher average age than Stockton, and whilst the budgets should reflect this, Jesmond will probably have a higher engineering spend maintaining older vehicles, and this is possibly why quality lacks in some areas.

Think the big operators are all being squeezed at the moment - we're seeing many PVR reductions at Stagecoach at the moment, and upcoming fleet revisions at Arriva will see the engineering spares reduce at almost every depot.