(27 Aug 2023, 9:50 am)L469 YVK wrote Still going to be impacted regardless whether there's new vehicles. X21 will suffer especially around the Bedlington Station area.....but if Arriva could somehow work out how to avoid Nedderton, they could still win passengers heading to Gosforth and the more Northernly parts of the City Centre around Haymarket as Central Station will be at least a 15 minute walk.
Getting back to topic......as for the X93/X94 though, it's a hard one to invest due to the seasonal nature of the route. Best time to have taken the B9TLs off would've been around 2020/21 when they still would've served some purpose and been fairly good on the X14/X20.
Unless Arriva are waiting to see how things play out at Blyth and if can still make money despite the ABTRL, maybe a large StreetDeck order with some 6-Cylinder examples thrown in for the X93/X94.
To be fair the best way to do it would be do something like this every 7.5 years:
New Buses: X14/X15/X18/X20/X93
The buses which are now 7.5 year old moved onto the 35/48/X46/X93(Summers)/P1/P2 with the last 3 moved to another depot to give much needed additional Christmas capacity during the winter months.
The busus from the above routes which are now 15 years old moved into spares / schools / withdrawn.
7.5 years, repeat again. Would keep a general upgrade going through on the hard routes and secondary routes. It's kind of being happening at Ashington anyway with the 57 -> 14/64 -> 72 plates.
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Similar could be said for the 5/5A and X4 aswell, with those buses being moved to a secondary route - take a pick there's loads of them about, maybe the X2/X3/64 rota, there should be enough I think.