Arriva North West - Southport Depot

[CX54 DKD (Moderator)]

RE: Arriva North West - Southport Depot
The 395 being operated with B44F sized vehicles is hardly a new thing though. In fact, is that not what Skem's 59 plate Pulsars were purchased for? Interesting that's become the issue now St Helens have the route... The issue with the capacity now being more of a problem does seem to stem from the decrease in capacity on the 375/385 coinciding with the decline in reliability of the B7s.

What I always found interesting was that there never seemed to be such an issue with the reliability of the DLAs whilst allocated to Skem. As I've suggested before, I suspect this could be partly due to having an adequate fleet of spares - only having the same number of deckers as the PVR of the 375/385 was always going to be a big problem, given how demanding the route is, with anything but brand new vehicles which you'd expect to be more reliable. It's a shame that the DLAs aren't being used to sub ahead of single deck vehicles though. Particularly during the holidays when there should be enough of them lying around to provide cover even if another were to fail down route. The only way I can really see capacity being met as required, daily, on that corridor now, by Arriva, would be through investment in new vehicles for the route which can meet the required levels of reliability. Something that you would thing should be more than justifiable given the revenue figure skemnational has given.

Edit: As an aside, don't expect to see larger vehicles on the 352/395 any time soon; the loadings don't justify it on the 352 and there's no evening/Sunday work on the 395 anyway.