(27 Mar 2014, 7:57 pm)Dan wrote Vehicles are usually attached to the running board number - I'm not sure whether drivers are confined to these interworking patterns (i.e. have a long break in the middle of the dedicated scholar boards) or not (later go onto commercial work after doing a scholar).
The interworking patterns I gave earlier are on separate boards, so in theory the vehicle allocated to service 884 (am) should be allocated to services 871 (pm) and 888 (pm) - it should not then appear on service 887 (pm) instead, but I am aware that 'split shifts' exist, though. This means that if the bus returns to the depot for a long break in the middle, it can easily be replaced by another vehicle to perform the afternoon duty. It's unusual for this to happen with the boards which perform commercial work in between.
However, in the case of a branded vehicle appearing on the route (such as a "Pronto"), it is not unusual for the vehicle to be replaced by another to allow that vehicle to go back to Crook. Much like branded vehicles appearing on a service for which they are not branded for, engineers/allocators should look to replace the vehicle as soon as possible to allow it to go back to where it should be.
It'll depend on how the rotas are set up at the individual depot, but speaking from my experience the duties that do a morning scholars run may then go onto other work when they get back to the depot.
For example when I was at Stagecoach we had a duty where you would take a decker out about 0645 and do a 35 from Wolviston Court to Stockton, run light to Acklam and do school run 303 to Macmillan Academy. You'd then take the decker back to depot (0820ish) and staff transport would take you down to Stockton high street where you would take over a 52 at 0850 and spend around 2.5 hours on that and come off around 1130.
They've split them off now onto a part time rota though.
Chester may have a similar sort of thing. It's likely that once the vehicles are back in off the morning runs (those that don't pick up X25s or whatever anyway) they'll become spares for the rest of the day so if anything breaks down (or requires changing over for whatever reason) then the deckers can be thrown out at a moments notice, no need to defect check them as they've already been out etc, saving valuable time. As with every depot who operate schools though, there will always be the usual scramble about 2pm to go and get all the deckers back in to send out on the schools... This will be when you end up with allocations being all over using whatever engineering can spare/have fixed to get the deckers off.