(11 May 2014, 10:14 am)robisdave15 wrote That's a tricky one with Arriva and branding, just as I guess it is for other operators? In theory it has it's advantages but in reality it makes operation / allocation difficult and has the possibility of confusing the public. Arriva vinyl branded services around Teesside for the likes of services 9 and 27 and in the main part, it worked with few vehicles operating away from their dedicated routes. Now, following the last service changes all these vehicles were de-branded to allow, I presume, better manage of the network? I'm wondering now if the new intakes of fleet for Sapphire 4/4x, 5/5a will be in standard livery or branded same as Sapphire 7 ? I'm kinda assuming it's to be the latter?

The Pulsars were debranded to give flexibility in allocating, especially given we now interwork 9/27As to increase reliability, with the "short" 27s (as we used to call them...) now on their own. Obviously we couldn't have 9 branded Pulsars ending up on 27s and vice versa, so the decision was taken to de-brand them all.

The 29 still gets allocated Pulsars when we have spares, alongside Prestiges mainly, with the odd Cadet still escaping on there too! The summer should see a few changes but the Pulsars should stay pretty much where they are now, albeit in September the ones off the 5/5A will become surplus and will move to another route (17s seem to be favourite?).

The Sapphire vehicles should be branded for their "home" route but there will be a dedicated spare vehicle which will float between Redcar and Stockton depending on who needs it. I can't see any other routes being branded as we are still working on ways to increase reliability, and tweaks to the routes in July will help with this.