(27 Feb 2015, 10:01 pm)tyresmoke wrote Few changes to plans over next few months thanks to Durham County Council starting major roadworks at the Honest Lawyer junction outside Durham - see http://www.durham.gov.uk/article/4955/Wo...e-underway
This means that the Sapphire launch has been postponed on service 6, and vehicles have been swapped around too. In April we now have the launch of services 22 and 24 - utilising the Streetlites on service 22 (matching the allocation on service 23 into Sunderland I guess!) and the cascaded Pulsars from service 7 being allocated to the 24.
Once the roadworks are finished we should see service 6 be converted to Sapphire. Ironically North West are using a batch of freed up Pulsars on rail replacement works for the next few months. After this they will probably transfer to us and go for refurbishment for use on the 6, alongside the E400s on the decker boards.
I think it kind of makes a bit more sense having Pulsars on the 6 instead of being mixed with StreetLite's on the 6. It is a good idea to delay the 6 launch as Sapphire with these works as you don't want to launch a drive to bring new passengers when the service is running late due to roadwork's and having them put off because of this.
Isn't the 24 busier than the 22, if so it may be better to put the StreetLite's on the 24 if they have 44 seats like the other examples as the 7 Pulsar's only have 40 seats and I think this is part of the problems with passenger overcrowding on the 7 with there being 4 less seats.