(05 Jan 2017, 2:29 pm)Dan wrote Seems to be taking an awful long time to prepare these for service - they've been in the region for 9 months now, surely they can't have that much wrong with them?
Slatyford have had 22509 and 22511 for two months now following repaint - I expected that these would have been on the road by now, but can't find any photographs of them in service. I doubted the accuracy of our fleet lists, given that they'd been there for so long.
Can only assume it's down to depot costings, maybe a slight bit of reluctance(!). Quite a bit of money has been spent on sorting 22570/74/79/80/81 and they're barely par, I can only assume they keep being put on the back burner resulting in slow progress. Suppose fettling 13 buses at once (inc E300), MANs at that, together with their remaining MAN-heavy fleet (which is costly enough), would pretty much blow Slatyford's monthly budget and wouldn't look great when Slatyford in particular is trying to curb it's costings.
Being 18.240s I'd assume the Kinetics have gone the same way as the E300s with climbing maintenance and high depreciation costs making more economic repairs the best way to keep them ticking over, then offloading to other regions meaning their acquired condition could be questionable... Pretty ironic as the Stockton ones seem to go well still.