Stagecoach MCSL - Gillmoss Depot

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RE: Stagecoach Merseyside - Gillmoss Depot

(25/10/2012 20:35)cumbria0902150 Wrote:  

(25/10/2012 19:06)Gillmoss 0324 Wrote:  Ideally Stagecoach should think of introducing deckers to the 20/21. This is the main Gillmoss route that is suffering capacity wise and unlike the 14's the 20/21's don't have major competition from Arriva. It's naive to say vandalism wouldn't happen, however when Merseybus to GTL ran the Titan's there wasn't excessive amounts of vandalism on these routes and generally there have been a few cases of serious vandalism and burn outs on Stagecoach Manchester deckers in the last few years. Still not stopping them from buying them or introducing them in that region. Overall I can't see any vandalism to a double decker operating in these area's being any worse than some of the vandalism deckers have had in Leeds, West Midlands, Glasgow and London all area's which receive substantial double deck orders.

To be honest, vandalism isn't much of a reason to not get double deckers and I wouldn't think that still stands today now there's so much CCTV on board buses that can be used to help trace the culprits and charge them for the repairs/cleaning.
I'm not going to get into it all, it would just bring up yet more arguments, but in all honesty I can say that if there was a [undefined=undefined]*business*[/undefined] case for double deckers, then Gillmoss would have more. A double decker costs roughly £25,000 more than a single, which Gillmoss management would have to cover the cost of through cost cutting or fare increases, unless an organisation was willing to partly support them (sometimes Universities will provide a grant to bus operators to upgrade vehicles used on the commercial services, to improve travel for their students). There's minimum profit levels that commercially operated services need to make (for them to be commercially viable), and in some cases, introducing more expensive double deckers onto services can take the route profitability below that profit level. With cuts in BSOG and expenses rising ABOVE fare increases, the financial effect of new or larger vehicles needs to be carefully analysed to minimise risk.
I do understand passenger frustration when buses are full, I've been there myself when a single decker has been covering a double decker on a peak time hourly service here, which used to happen almost daily. In Cumbria on hourly services, it is difficult to just get the next one in an hours time, so you just have to stand up and get on with it, or wait around in the cold for an hour getting you home later.

(25/10/2012 19:06)Gillmoss 0324 Wrote:  Maybe with a few exceptions most other Gillmoss routes can operate okay with full size single deckers - but that's the thing dart's are to small for these routes so really they should be withdrawn and transferred to other parts of the Stagecoach group with full size vehicles like ALX 300/MAN's coming in as replacements.

The problem there is availability of vehicles. At the moment, some regions are just pushing for full low floor allocations, where other regions are starting to work towards fully DDA compliant. Merseyside is one of those regions now working for full DDA compliance. The problem is, there isn't really that many larger DDA compliant single deckers around that can transfer in to replace non-complaint B10BLE's at Gillmoss, so Darts from Preston have been transferred in as they were available. Stagecoach (the big head office in Perth) ordered a lot of Dart's in the mid 00's, rather than ordering full size MAN ALX's (only 4 more seats in MAN ALX than Dart, for about £10k more, and with the Darts being all ADL, Stagecoach could strike a better deal with them being a shareholder), so the likely situation you'd get is either take the Dart's from Preston now before another area takes them up, or take Dart's in 2015 from elsewhere to replace the B10BLE's before 1st January 2016. From a capacity point of view, the 2nd is more ideal, but from a business point it is better to take them now so they're covered for DDA in plenty of time before there's a big push for them. I can't say what might be in the pipeline, but it is operationally better to take compliant Darts for now and keep looking for more suitable vehicles, rather than to hold off and maybe not meet the deadlines. Unfortunately, at the moment it seems the only single decks available are old S/T/V reg MAN ALX300's which neither DDA certified or meet Euro3 standards for the Merseytravel QBP's, and unfortunately we've been stuck with them to just get services low floor!

(25/10/2012 19:06)Gillmoss 0324 Wrote:  My ideal situation would be for 20 Hybrid Enviro 400's being introduced for the 20/21, 20-25 ALX400/Trident and/or Envrio 400's aged roughly 8-5 years old coming in at Gillmoss with the remaining operations being full sized single deckers.

Please conisder our comments Stagecoach if you read these pages.

Again it is down to availability and business case. Like I said above, a lot of regions and depots are just trying to get low floors at the minute, which involves a lot of Olympian's needing replaced, so it is inevitable that they'd take some sort of priority over available low floor double deckers. While Olympian's generally are for school work, a lot of depots have their boards so that the school buses work public services in between, which see's the demand for low floor double deckers to both meet required capacities for school services, and providing the low floor easy access for on the services. In a lot of cases, this will see areas take newer double deckers, such as Enviro400's, to replace older Tridents on frontline services, to allow the older Tridents replace the Olympian's on such school boards.
Unfortunately, London Tridents are not always the answer. They have a very low value, and are in rather poor condition, many to the point where the scrapyard has been the best place for them. The cost required to bring them to a usable state can be quite high, which makes them unviable for further operations with Stagecoach. For starters, it costs a few thousand just for the single door conversion to DDA standards, then the poor reliability results in new engines being fitted at the cost of roughly £10,000 each, so depots can end up spending a lot more on making them suitable than they're worth. This is something Gillmoss have had to suffer, paying such large amounts just to increase reliability and make them good, and I'd imagine it is something they'd probably prefer to avoid again with a new batch so close to the current fleet being done. We've suffered the same poor reliability here in Cumbria with the open top ones, the reliability is that poor that open top Olympian 16329 was brought back into service to cover both of them being off the road, on a number of occasions! I'd love ours to be re-engined but the money simply isn't there to do it, so fitters are having to repair them as best as they can, in between towing them in along with the awful MAN ALX's we've got.

Don't worry about your suggestion being seen by management, they will and possibly already have :-) This forum, along with facebook and yahoo groups, are regularly watched, which is why I can't post a lot of things I'd like to post, and have had to cut down on my posts! :-)

Thank you to both yourself and 0324 for bringing this issue back to sensibility both in different ways.