Arriva North West - St Helens Depot

[K853 MTJ]

RE: Arriva North West - St Helens Depot

(23/01/2013 22:04)CX54 DKD Wrote:  The T-PNBs being withdrawn tallys up with what management allegedly wanted - R, S & T single decks gone as near to the end of last year as possible.

With regards the X-regs, there's another good three years out of them yet, they're only just turning 12. Also don't forget that being from the back-end of the year, the V reg Marshalls potentially have another 8-10 months to go too. I suspect they'll start to be withdrawn upon developing costly faults as with the T reg examples though.

7622 is an odd one mind because it would potentially have another 8(ish) months in service if it weren't off the road... With replacement engines having been coming out of Darts for a while now, including 2320 according to MM, would it really be that much trouble to fit one, replace the dashboard (which is only a case of re-attaching some plugs and putting in some screws anyway) and then pulling a front panel from a withdrawn T reg example to continue to make money out of it? To potentially act as an extra vehicle during the exodus of the T reg vehicles, it still genuinely wouldn't surprise me if it were to return to the road especially given that it's been treated to P&P. Within a short term period anyway; the longer it's left the less likely they are to do anything with it, obviously.

With 7622, its not impossible, but a bit of a pointless thing IMO. First it would take up time and capacity in the engineering part them the body part of St Helens, all of that adds to cost, and as I'm sure everyone knows, they are on a tight schedule and high work load as it is as Speke go through P&P. All of the parts may be easy to get hold of, but it would be somewhat futile to do quite a lot of work on a bus that A) has blew at least 1 more engine since it was decided to try and put it back into service following it's arrival from Bolton, B) is going to replace a vehicle of pretty much the same age and will last around 6-8 months before inevitably going for scrap, and C) A bus that has already had quite a bit of time, money and resources spent trying to get it back on the road, personally I think Arriva will cut their losses and just keep it stored until scrap, extra work and parts bump up the book value on a bus which is only going to be sold for scrap value anyway. Not only would it provide useful spares to keep others going a little bit longer, but if it has a freshly retrimmed set of seats, theres nothing stopping Arriva putting them in another Marshall or any other bus that has the same style and sized seats, it wouldn't cost them anything but a quick half an hour which would drastically improve the buses interior appearance.
I completely appreciate your point, don't want you to think I'm shooting you down, after all stranger things have happened (1046 and 1047 getting new engines in the last year of their servicable life)!

Edit: K101 beat me to it! :P