(Yesterday, 10:58 pm)solsburian wrote It must be a lose-lose situation having a microfleet of Solo SRs too - I can't imagine they could justify holding on to any meaningful large bank of spare parts for them, so when one does breakdown, they could be wating a while for a new part on order.
Yeah agreed, it'll be interesting if when the next renewal for the 434 comes up if they just plan to give it up and whether 3051 ends up becoming a christmas tree as no doubt the thing will break again in the next few weeks as it's a complete shed.
(Yesterday, 11:29 pm)Shrek wrote You state in your post that the fleet hasn't been looked after for years. Can anybody reasonably expect a new engineering manager and team to get up to speed in a couple of months? I expect they're fighting a losing battle until new buses arrive and moves give them something to work with.
To be fair, it's not totally unreasonable to expect them to have enough buses to run a days service either. I haven't worked it out but Ashington seems to have a lot of spares vehicles.
Blyth have a much older fleet and they can run a days service and it's not like their routes are much easier considering the hardest work at Ashington has brand new E400MMC's give or take and Blyth's expresses are ran by 16 year old DB300's.