(13 Jun 2015, 8:04 pm)MrPottski wrote 1415 was on the 6 again today. One of Darlington's deckers has had "issues" recently, so the spare has being used on the 7. When one goes bang, no spare to cover. I do have to admit though, allocation is one of the worst jobs, Darlington do manage to get it done most of the time on run out, it's only when issues arise later that you have branded vehicles go walkies. For instance, if you have already allocated the spare Sapphire to, say, an X75/6 due to a breakdown, then another Sapphire also has issues, pulling the spare off the X75/6 to get it back on the 7 will be virtually impossible. In an ideal world, we would have a limitless engineering budget, so breakdowns wouldn't happen, and branded vehicles would always be where they should be.

Darlington do seem to be the best at keeping the Sapphire buses off other routes and usually when it does happen it seems to be something they don't want to do but have pretty much nothing else to allocate to the service so have to use a Sapphire bus rather than having no bus. We had two MAX Omnicitys do the 21 recently after EcoCitys have failed so this has probably happened due to limited availability.

I have seen times when there has been a Sapphire bus on other routes and have been unable to change it onto the 7 when another Sapphire bus has failed, was one on the 75/76 one day and an MPD had to be chucked out on the 7 as the Sapphire bus was at Barney at the time the MPD went out.

Would be nice if Darlington could have another Sapphire spare or even a bus with most of the Sapphire features WiFi, charging points etc.