(02 Mar 2021, 2:17 pm)mb134 wrote Yeah I'm led to believe 7484 failed at Bedlington Station. 7446 also failed in Ashington bus station around the same time but they got that going again and picked up its run an hour or so later on the return leg. 

I've been critical of the lack of investment, but ultimately this looks more and more like it's just shoddy maintenance at Ashington. In the space of a month you'd like to think they'd get to the point where they could meet PVR without having to use vehicles that should be parked up. 7514 being off for a month then being taken off on its second day screams of an incomplete repair and/or inadequate road testing. The amount of times 7530 failed last week equally reeks of engineers patching it, or not being bothered to properly diagnose and fix a problem. Again, with the frequency 7517 is taken off the road I think it's fair to assume it has an ongoing issue - competent management at depot level should be aware of that and demanding answers from engineering staff as to why it is - and getting them to fix it properly. Eventually customers notice the same vehicles having issues, and it starts to look bad on the company. I was on an Elite i up here in September which failed just outside of Aberdeen, one of the regulars got off and you could hear him saying to the driver that it was the second day running the same bus had failed in virtually the same location - punters pay attention to these things when it inconveniences them.

Yeah I seen 7446 died but didn't know whether it was the tracking breaking again like on 2809.

God knows what's going on there lately, they've got an awful lot of buses off the road though. Wonder if there's something up with Arriva NE and Enviro's tho as it seems there's 6/12 VOR at Durham and Darlo aswell or they're not using them but I believe Darlington has been loaning buses from Stockton due to shortages (or it may have been the other way round). Agreed with the comments about customers noticing though, definitely something very wrong lately.

Be interesting to see if timetables go back to normal next week for the schools going back as Ashington are in trouble if they do due to a lack of buses.