(01 Apr 2023, 1:30 pm)xpm wrote I may be wrong here but from memory I think 4725 was the first one to be done - and that's only from me being a lad and riding them every day from Washy to Heworth.

Again, this is from memory and maybe from some information I've seen whilst looking over NNRG stuff, I believe either the body or chassis on the lynx suffered badly from corrosion, and I remember the paint blebbing badly around panel edges quite early on in their service life, maybe the plastic skirts etc were removed because of this (just a guess), they didn't seem to wear that well either with bigger and bigger bolts and washers being needed to hold them into place, although I do agree what they did when they removed them really didn't do anything for the looks of them - and when you combine that with the awful Wear Buses paint scheme, after the inital shine had worn off they looked even worse.

Its odd that DIPTAC was mentioned because I could have sworn these had it as standard when they came with the original red (and brown?) seats - but looking at other pictures maybe they were just black, and possibly upgraded when they did the seat retrim into the yellow diamond type bars.  One thing I do remember from the start is that the luggage racks behind the entrance door were awful - noisy and the front bar was just far to weak to be of any real use, they were bent almost straight away and luggage frequently fell off them.

Reading elsewhere the drivers windscreen seemed to have a bit of an issue with it falling out, although I'm not sure whether it was a problem in the GAN fleet.

Thanks for all your help and info. Yeah I must say I never noticed any other bus operator rebuilding their Lynxes to be honest so does make you wonder if it was a problem with GAN's fleet. I'm sure the likes of the old Busways and United ones were never rebuilt.

I quite liked the first version of the Wear Buses livery to be honest and I think it suited the Lynx but I didn't care too much for the second version with the light green top half and mid green lower half.