(16 Nov 2017, 11:52 pm)mb134 wrote Roughly translates as "Can we scrimp on yet another route to please the accountants?"

I'm sure Go North East's accountants would be equally as happy if the company choose not to invest in routes, instead running fully depreciated assets... What would be over a £2m investment in new vehicles for the "Connections4" route (11 PVR + 1 spare), depending on the outcome of this vehicle trial, could go out to shareholders instead! Great news!

In reality, I think this means that Go North East are acknowledging that the vehicles on this service are 4 years old, and will shortly need to start considering replacement vehicles on this service (and while they have a demonstrator available to them which would be natural progression for the service in terms of investment, it'd be mad not to try it out).

As an enthusiast; I'd agree that a Streetlite is a downgrade compared to a Citaro (I personally think the Mercs are one of the best buys since the Volvo B10BLEs, even if they are more expensive to run and very expensive to maintain), but from a passenger perspective, there's probably not a great deal of difference other than the fact we can assume USB charging points would be made available (bringing this service up to standard with most other routes, as it currently lacks this feature).

The centenary year of investment was a strange one, especially the intake of this batch of Mercedes Citaros. Outside looking in at the time, it possibly looked like the choice for vehicle type was based on what could be made available the soonest at a specific time (they took delivery of a batch of Solos, Versas, Streetlites and Citaros pretty much all at the same time - the Volvo B9s being the only examples which followed a bit later than the rest, a month or so after all of the single-decks).

There was certainly no urgent 'need' to provide a heavy-weight vehicle on this route, in my opinion. Within our community, it looks worse that Go North East would be replacing a heavy-weight vehicle (Mercedes Citaro) with a light-weight one (Streetlite) - whereas if this choice had been made in the first instance, the Streetlite would have been replacing Scania L94s, which I doubt would look as "bad".