(26 Feb 2025, 3:18 am)deanmachine wrote I always found it funny that the engineering staff would start work after a good chunk of the fleet had went out on a morning rather than working on getting stuff fixed during the night, but you're right, it would cost too much, and I doubt they'd want to be fixing buses during the night either.
Where I worked, the depot did initially have two nightshift fitters carrying out inspections over five nights from Sunday to Thursday. The inspections were, by and large excluding any major work, successfully completed in-line the maintenance schedule (every 35 days, so every vehicle was inspected once over a 5 week period). However, one of those fitters retired, and instead of replacing them on nightshift, management opted to move all inspections to the day. From that point on, standards started to slp as it was taking longer to inspect the buses due to getting them back off the road whilst in service. By the time I left, the maintenance schedule was nearly three weeks behind where it should have been with no sign of any improvement.
The nightshift premium, at the time, was around £2 over the normal fitters rate. So whilst the expenditure of the workforce would increase, I'd imagine that would be offset by savings elsewhere through, for example, sending fitters and other depot staff (including myself) to chase buses around the operational area to perform driver changeovers in order to get vehicles back to the depot for planned maintenance work.
Completely shortsighted, in my view, but, hey-ho.
(26 Feb 2025, 9:38 am)ian foster wrote The other problem you have working at night if the depot is in a residential area then you would probably have some nimby kicking off complaining about noise
In the past this may have been a problem with depot's like Winlaton being situated on the edge of a housing estate, but currently I can't think of any GNE depot aside from perhaps Percy Main and Hexham where this would apply. And something like this could be easily remedied by turning, for example, Hexham into an outstation and moving all major engineering work up to Consett or over to Riverside.