(9 hours ago)PH - BQA wrote Exactly. Purchased for the X21/22, and with new deckers arriving they definitely shouldn't be straying from there? From memory the Pulsars also can't do the mileage of a couple of the boards, yet they're happy to keep those (make that make sense). It's such a non-issue, that it screams someone has made a bad decision and they're desperate to try and cover their back. To show how irrelevant it is, check 7547 on 21 January, 7549 on 17 January, 7543 on 6 January - all three comfortably finished X18 midnights. I can't find any example over the past few weeks where a 17-plate has been swapped off an X18 midnight in the evening either - indicating both that they are trusted to finish them, and that the 72-plates are generally allocated anyway...

The situation at Ashington is increasingly bad. There were multiple hour long gaps in the X21, X22, and 35 today as two consecutive boards were dropped on each service - AGAIN. Clear that the supervisors aren't getting monitored as they should be by management, if I was that incompetent at my job I'd expect to be on a PIP or out of the door. They're back to using clapped out Pulsars on express work again, which is having the expected (to anyone with half a brain cell) consequences. 1512 failed on an X20 this morning, 1404 was hauled off an X18 on Saturday and failed twice today on the 35, 1462 made it to Longframlington and back today before failing (after earlier failing on an X21). They're completely inappropriate for the work they're being used on, and nothing is being done to remedy the situation. 

I can almost see the press release now. They'll reduce frequencies citing lower passenger numbers, entirely because they aren't running half of the services, and the death spiral will continue - rather than seeing if passenger numbers return to where they were when they actually had functional vehicles. They seem to have no appreciation that franchising could, and should, wipe every single one of them out of a job - along with GNE it would be a disgrace if they held onto the current monopoly that they have if they don't quickly make improvements. 

People were very vocal on here in recent months when engineering staff were replaced, it is interesting how silent they now are given the situation is getting significantly worse on a daily basis. New engineering manager clearly doesn't know what he is doing, local management clearly have no contingency plan, and once again the 'armchair experts' on here were correct in their criticism.