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Thanks for confirming it st helens rider.

i had a ride on it, very good bus, good addition to the fleet

I've just seen an X-AJA SB120 on the 352 in Orrell heading towards St. Helens, it drove past fairly quickly however I think the registration was X418AJA (I'm not exactly sure though, it looked like it was X418 but it could have been X419 or whatever). I've never seen one of these batch of Cadets work out of St. Helens before so thought I'd let you all know!

2416,2418 and 2421 are in service with 3 or 4 more to enter service very soon

2418 it is on the 352/395 as i know 2416 is on the 329 today.

Rode 2416 today and it seem to be having some gear issues - the driver was manually going up the gears. Took ages to pick up some speed but didn't seem too bad when it did. Bright interior and it didn't seem too crashy either.

37/38 have seemed to have reverting back to 100% cadet allocation over the past couple of days. The awful 2491/94 being on there for the past couple of days. 2491 seems to get worse everytime I ride the thing. Dread that thing turning up now!

(15/05/2013 19:42)anw2015 Wrote: [ -> ]37/38 have seemed to have reverting back to 100% cadet allocation over the past couple of days. The awful 2491/94 being on there for the past couple of days. 2491 seems to get worse everytime I ride the thing. Dread that thing turning up now!

2494 redeems itself for me with it's turn of speed. If they sorted the rear axle crashing around on it, it'd be a much nicer ride overall though. 2491 on the other hand... Couldn't agree with you more! Don't know what happened to that during it's prolonged period off the road earlier last year, but it's the worst of our allocation by a long stretch. And to think that drivers keep it out late on the 356 when they have the option of running into Jackson Street for an SR or a Pulsar.. Madness!

Yep it has got a decent turn of speed and it is that awful crashing of the axle that is just horrible. Provides a very uncomfortable ride at times if you sit near the back. To be fair 2491 can get a shift on too. The only one out of that batch that is sluggish is 2493 although I have rode that for a couple of weeks.

That is mad, I'm surprised that the cadets stay out the majority of the time if that is the case. I'm presuming from a driver perspective that the cadets are nice to drive then?

I'm surprised 2493 seems sluggish - as I mentioned in an earlier post a few days back, had that back on the 34 one day last week and it did seem pretty fast, especially on the Pennington Lane stretch between Earlestown and Parr.

(15/05/2013 21:06)anw2015 Wrote: [ -> ]That is mad, I'm surprised that the cadets stay out the majority of the time if that is the case. I'm presuming from a driver perspective that the cadets are nice to drive then?

I know the handbrake lock on the doors tends to be a common complaint. I'm not really sure why some drivers tend not to run them in during the ~15 minutes layover they get between trips but then again, that 15 minutes in itself may be the reason; they'd rather just have that time to themselves than spending it running in to Jackson Street picking up a replacement bus. Another potential reason may be that some would rather drive a Cadet around Crank than a full size Pulsar but saying that, there are still SRs available.

The provision is certainly there for them to run in to Jackson Street and swap the bus over though - there's usually a number of Pulsars lined up having been run in off of an earlier duty, washed, fuelled and ready to be taken back out again and there also tends to be an SR or two parked up on the front fence.