Arriva North West - St Helens Depot

[CX54 DKD (Moderator)]

RE: Arriva North West - St Helens Depot
I noticed before breaking up for Christmas that one of the previously Dart operated duties on the 37/38 was seeing a, pretty much, daily allocation of a Renown with the other daytime board seeing Cadets and Darts and the late board still retaining a Cadet. Even if a bit of a waste of capacity, a pleasant change anyway!

On the Solo issue, I completely agree that the shorter examples are totally unsuitable for anything other than the 35/A and 312. In fact, their introduction to the garage for a specific set of routes (37/38/356), based upon patronage recorded during a period when usage is reduced yearly anyway, was an absolute farce - they should never have been allocated here. With the SRs however, I think we have just enough of those to operate the specified local services (32/A, 33 & 35/A) though agree that anymore would be pretty detrimental in encouraging their allocation elsewhere. It certainly seems to me that the only real issues with the SRs come about when they're allocated away from the local routes. Obviously in the case of a breakdown that's unavoidable but when it's from the beginning of the day, it's a poor show. As I said earlier, I think the necessity for smaller, more manoeuvrable vehicles for St Helens was exaggerated besides which, the idea of the SRs being more manoeuvrable is simply not the case due to their wheelbase.