Greater Manchester Tenders

[M60lad]

RE: Greater Manchester Tenders
What does the tender for 171/172 specify in regard to vehicles used? For a very long time and as far back as I can imagine it even back to when Maynes operated it, it was always a single decker route in fact the Marshall Darts that Maynes had were bought specifically for the route from what I remember and it you very rarely got double deckers on the route.

Its only recently since Diamond at Bolton took over the route that double deckers have been the preferred vehicle for some reason.

As for the situation with 18 another thing that I don't think helped the route was when they started putting the small TfGM hybrids on the route which have become unreliable (I believe there's a few of them at Switch/Optare at Trafford Park) so maybe this is another reason why passenger levels have dropped.

Oh and don't forget the daytime 18 route runs from Eccles-Manchester Airport via a loop of Trafford Park before getting to Eccles, one thing I can't get my head round is that for some reason there's one or more evening journeys on the route that run in service to Eccles then run dead back to Trafford Centre surely if the journey finishes in Eccles it would make sense for the return journey to start at Eccles, yes the journey might not pick any passengers in Trafford Park but surely the tender covers this.