First Manchester

[P528LND]

RE: First Manchester

(31/10/2013 00:18)jimbo Wrote:  Yeah that 409 diversion is going to be stupid, funny but stupid, gonna take best part of an hour to do the oldham to rochdale segment.

As for 66874 that has one huge arse steering whrrl compared to others

An extra 35 minutes is a bit extreme considering its evening traffic and not stopping. I would consider the diversion to take about 10-15 minutes, so journey times between Rochdale and Oldham will be about 35-40 minutes. By my understanding there is a decent amount of waiting time at Rochdale and a little bit of such at Ashton - to be honest I don't see much in a sense of late departures, and if so I see little more than 5 minutes unless major glitches are found.

Honestly though, there are enough 8.5m - 9.2m Optares and 9.3m Darts to run the 409 tomorrow evening temporarily, and could have therefore avoided the massive run practically into Middleton then back - rather than continuing to Mill Brow running via Holden Fold Lane like the 402 does to an extent - which runs as Solos usually. This diversion would easily have taken little more than 5 minutes longer than the planned diversion, as stated before expected by me to take 10-15 minutes.

And yet, even so, I don't even believe an Enviro400 would fare badly following this route either!

Either way, the 409 isn't radically busy at this time either so capacity issues I wouldn't see as a problem. Not only that, what would you rather do - run older buses on a diverted route and keeping to time much easier or run brand new buses on a service that is unlikely to turn up at any scheduled point? I wouldn't choose the latter personally.