(10 Jan 2025, 3:12 pm)Ambassador wrote Surely there's a contigency? Hire vehicles in from a competent operator or someone like Ensign?

If the issue is lack of engineering labour (which I suspect it is), then hiring more vehicles into the fleet isn’t the answer: they can’t maintain the fleet they have, without adding more into the mix.

I already hazard a guess that Washington are housing more than the 65 vehicles they are permitted to on their operators licence - assuming nothing has changed in the last year, the PVR at Washington was 57 with 8 spare buses (total 65), meaning there was no wiggle-room to house buses not intended to be there. Washington have been running a Sprinter over and above their fleet allocation for some time now (while the baby Solo has been running on normal Solo work).

The situation is dire. I’m told this week it has been commonplace for up to 33% of Washington and Consett’s buses to be missing at school times. It is going to take a long time to recover from this, and I’d argue Nexus and Durham County Council should be taking action to, as a minimum, temporarily suspend some of GNE’s contracts (so they can focus on running their commercial services, including those in receipt of BSIP funding to boost frequencies). There have been numerous times vehicle availability has been poor in the post-Covid world we live in, but nothing to this extent.