Arriva North West - St Helens Depot

[H101GEV (Administrator)]

RE: Arriva North West - St Helens Depot
I had a ride on 4207 this evening leaving town at around 18.20 and I have to be completely honest here - it was a dreadful bus. The ride was sluggish, the suspension unforgiving and the ride itself riddled with crashing and squeaking. Put simply, this is significantly worse to ride than any of the 50 North West DLAs I've sampled.

I believe this is one of the examples refurbished at St Helens and, although the external repaint is better than the Blackburn ones, the interiors simply aren't up to scratch. Credit to Blackburn for their excellent internal refurbishments of the VLWs which were fully repainted internally and given new flooring and cream handrails. This example hadn't had its interior panels repainted and retained yellow handrails and black floor. There is already a fair bit of vandalism upstairs too, presumably from its use on school work, including a slashed seat, another burnt and another graffitied. A real pity to see this already, but certainly no surprise.

The major positive note though was seeing two deckers on the 10 corridor again. Very welcome indeed. If present rumours are to be believed, this is merely a taster of what's to come and I'm sure I speak for the many hundreds of regular 10 passengers when I say new deckers can't come soon enough.