(27 Mar 2014, 10:20 pm)tyresmoke wrote 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.
When Stagecoach South Shields operated school services it was much more simple, once finished on the school service it operated the Asda Free Bus for Boldon Asda