(16 Nov 2025, 6:09 pm)morritt89 wrote As someone who has driven Streetdecks and B9's (native and otherwise), Streetdecks seem more suited to local start stop work which I would argue the 56 sort of is as there is no real high speed non stop running sections. The B9's when allocated to my scholars work often used to overheat after the high speed non stop running (the Voyager ones however seemed to be ok). I would say, as a driver, that Arrivas DB3000 Geminis are a nicer drive and a lot smoother than a Streetdeck though.

Overall, a B9 you have a big engine with a fair amount of grunt not doing very much whereas the current Streetdeck is a small engine working very hard. I would say that the newer Streetdeck with the new engine has scope to be a significant improvement on the original version.

To be fair, it's pretty much what they were designed for, similar to the B5TL's. They were blatently going for the London market but all the operators went for Hybrids instead which made both pretty much redundant from day one there.

I don't really understand why GoNorthEast bought them for what they were put on, it was pretty much obvious a tiny engine with a turbo was never going to work long term. Similar with Transdev with the Coastliner and B5TL's there aswell which are getting bailed out by a bunch of B9TL's and B7LRE's ironically.