i think SNE especially the Newcastle division needs more investment, when i worked there nearly ten years ago now it was either the 3rd largest division in UK bus or 3rd most profitable, i cant remember which one.  Now that DWS has pretty much won the takeover and stagecoach has swooped in with a 20 million pound takeover of east London buses to say things are tight is not much of an excuse.

i think if 25 new double decker's could be  sourced it would alleviate a few problems namely allowing the 15 eldest decker's from SNE to cascaded elsewhere. and the remaining ten being used to increase capacity on a number of services. replacing the 5 oldest or most problematic single decker's at slatyford would help to make the transition to CAZ easier. 

i would break it down as the following

15x E400MMCs for walkergate enabling a cascade replacing 5x2007 E400s and 10x2008 E400s throughout the rest of SNE
10xE400 EMMCs replacing 10 single decker's at slatyford firstly allowing 5 E200s to be replaced. perhaps 3 to walkergate for 317 route  allowing some of the older ALX300s to used for component recovery and 2E200s to go to hartlepool to enable 2 of the troublesome E200s there to be replaced. Perhaps cascading 3 of the SP08 E300s with one of them scrapped for component recovery and the remaining numbers for replacing ALX300s



https://www.insider.co.uk/news/stagecoac...l-27079387