Stagecoach North East

[cumbria0902150]

RE: Stagecoach North East
The older ex London Tridents were owned by Stagecoach, but due to the way disposals from London works, they went out to "public" tender, leaving them open to transfer around the UK or for sale to dealers. Coupled with the poor condition of the vehicles and low book value, they're often not worth the conversion costs to make them suitable for standard operations. The newer Tridents (2003 onwards I believe) have some sort of finance, but I don't know how exactly they're financed, or what will happen to those vehicles when their London life is up. If they're on HP, which some sources say, they could be bought by Stagecoach and transferred around the UK, or they might just be sold on.
A lot of Tridents currently on disposal from London are the short wheelbase variety, with a maximum of 64 seats with separate wheelchair and pushchair areas, 68 seats with a single wheelchair area, or 72 to non-DDA. The low capacity often makes them useless for school contracts specifying 70+ seats, more so in the case of 85 and 87 seat school contracts.
I don't have any information on the rumours, but a personal opinion is that some sort of Trident for conversion to open top would be likely. Cannot pass comment on Stockton's Olympian's as I don't know if they're under contract for a minimum seated capacity beyond that of a Trident, or if commercially operated, passenger figures not exceeding the capacity of a 10.5m Trident. Then of course there's cost, do the school routes pull the money in to pay for the Trident's.