(27 Mar 2014, 3:19 pm)robisdave wrote I've heard a few "comments" about Redcars engineering team and can agree, could be interesting to be a fly on the wall at ' roll out' some mornings? To give them some credit though they can only do what they can with what they've got (vehicles) and given (budget) I did hear once, don't know how reliable this mind, that Stocktons budget was far superior to Redcars in terms of engineering?
With regard to the running times I can go along with all you say; the first few days after the changes we had 5/5a drivers laying over in various laybys, running card in hand but now whilst this still happens some services seem to get well down on time? Maybe it's due to the loadings as you say? Guess we'll never get perfection?
Not sure on engineering budgets but Stockton looks after some of the oldest fleet members in the whole country with 15 Prestiges and the Cadets are still in decent condition for their age. Redcar's engineering ability has been questionable for years (anyone remember the pink and green Metroriders in the Steve Noble years!?) but things do seem to be improving slowly with new management being installed recently too.
As for the 5/5a's timings, there are a few times during the day where you can hit crazy traffic on Cargo Fleet Lane which can knock you back by 5 or 10 mins if you hit North Ormesby badly too. Especially around school time. Some of them have extra running time to try to combat this (see some of the morning arrivals into Middlesbrough around 0830-0900).
Others get hit by crazy loadings at various points in the journey, especially due to school children, the 0745 service 5 out of Middlesbrough gets all of the Nunthorpe kids for example (these used to be spread between the 0730 and 0745...) and coming the other way it's the 1525 into Mbro that gets them all. Another similar issue exists with the Laurence Jackson lot from Brotton and Skelton, if you lose 5 mins loading them all then it knocks you back for an hour or so.
Timings seem slacker during the middle of the day because the loadings are noticeably lower than at peak times but it will be interesting to see how the advent of Sapphire will affects this. I've driven some of the peak time services in and out of Middlesbrough and had plenty of standing passengers so I'm not convinced there is much room for growth at these times, and as you can't really increase the capacity on the 5/5a (due to low bridges at North Skelton and Brotton) then Arriva may have to look at increasing the frequency at these times, sort of similar to how the X17 (which replaced the X6) operates.