The DB300 have been absolute workhorses and have aged far more gracefully than their awful Scania ELC Cityzen predecessors too. We have agreed before, but I’ll re-iterate, Blyth probably should be mostly allocated deckers for all their services apart from the 553. As a rule of thumb, any Northumbria service starting or ending at Newcastle Haymarket should be a decker period IMHO.

Given the stop/start nature of the 306/308, those services should be the next candidate for EV deckers given their excellent acceleration.

For Ashington’s longer distance routes in a fantasy world I would re-introduce coaches on them, which would make it more attractive for tourists with luggage to boot. At the very best the busses used on the X15-X18 should have high backed seating as may customers will be on them for a while.