(3 hours ago)solsburian wrote Am I right in thinking that the initial batch of Ashington's StreetLites were intended for the 35? (IMHO I excluded that from the list as whenever I’ve seen it seemed to be busy enough to justify dekers). Keeping them off the express services into Newcastle may help their reliability I guess. I kind of feel bad for others when a decker appears on the 57/57a boards as it is a total overkill and would be better used elsewhere, but at I presume sometimes those boards are allocated deckers that may be having reliability issues so are kept “closer to home”.
Yeah that’s what they were initially branded. If memory serves two of them frequently appeared on the X14 prior to them going to Durham, as the Scanias were increasingly unreliable.
For the weekday 57/57A deckers, often when I’ve seen them on there it’s been a board which starts around the same time as a 21/22 should be going out that’s allocated a single decker instead - the allocations have been consistently awful there for some time now. If that is their logic I don’t see how Whitley Bay is any more local than Newcastle to be honest, and at least if it breaks on the X21 there’ll be something along in 20 minutes versus an hour on the 57.