(17 Nov 2022, 8:57 pm)L469 YVK wrote The whole logistics though. So........

- Dead mileage

- Euro 6 - Longer term vehicle maintenance, support costs and replacements

- Recruitment costs to plug driver gap

- More varied fleet to support

- Could potentially lose evening & Sunday work on mentioned routes

Not forgetting the opportunity to get rid of all single deck and minibus types with just StreetLites left to cover the 1/2/57/57A and the cost of running a StreetLite over a Solo won't be much more and cheaper than a Pulsar.

Then down the line if Blyth got 17x new vehicles for the X7/X9/X10/X11, that would see off all the 57 reg E400s and a good chunk of the 59 reg Geminis.

The dead mileage really isn't that big of an issue. Ashington or Blyth to Cramlington is no different from travelling dead from Jesmond, and the dead runs to Haymarket are no different to the previous dead runs from Jesmond to Morpeth/Ashington/Bebside/Hexham etc. I imagine they'll also look into eliminating some dead runs by adding extra peak journeys where appropriate. 

Euro 6 is not an issue, bar the small number of minibuses operated plus 7515-7 (which could potentially be cascaded once the 685 operation ends). 

Recruitment is needed anyway, and always will be. No business that wants to be successful is going to kill off swathes of profitable work just because they have a, potentially, temporary staffing shortage. 

I fail to see how there is a more varied fleet to support? 5 vehicle types (DB300, E400, Pulsar, Solo, Streetlite) is not huge variation, especially compared to fleet compositions of the past - Olympians, L113s, N113s, B10BLEs, Metroriders, MPDs, E400s, Tridents, SB220s, Solos, SB200s, B7TLs all operating from the Northumbria depots simultaneously at one point from memory.