Arriva North West - St Helens Depot

[H101GEV (Administrator)]

RE: Arriva North West - St Helens Depot
From the fleet list, I make the older stock at St Helens out to be the following:

1 V registered Renown (V-BLU)
1 V registered Dart (V-DJC)
1 X registered Renown (X-BLU)
17 X registered Darts (X-ANC/HJA/OBN)
9 X registered Cadets (X-AJA)
10 X registered Renowns (X-DBT)

Of these, I'd expect the V platers and the X registered Darts to be the top priority for replacement, meaning all of these should be withdrawn once the deckers enter service. The X plate Renown's days look numbered too.

Then, it's a toss-up. Personally, if only older stock does get replaced as part of the decker order, the Cadets should go before the Renowns based on age. Indeed, the non-Blue Bus Renowns should be safe until later in 2015 or early 2016 in some capacity. Whether they stay at St Helens remains to be seen. Otherwise, it wouldn't be too surprising if a handful of Pulsars did leave to replace life expired buses at other depots like Southport.

A further option is to cascade the remaining Renowns at Green Lane to either St Helens or Southport to speed up replacement of X plate buses. Both depots have significant batches of X plate Darts which need replacing one way or the other. The X-DBT Renowns are all built from January 2001 so Arriva have until the beginning of 2016 to withdraw them from routes serving Merseytravel bus stations.