East Midlands Railway stock shortages?

[morgainelive]

There seems to be some strange ad hoc stock being used for EMR recently. Are the 158s in shortage? The usual Norwich ro Liverpool trains are more often 2x156s and amazingly the Crewe-Derby on Monday around 1500 was a 4 car Meridian. Bet people were wondering what had happened to get such an upgrade from the 153 single carriages (believe these are more 2 cars of recent.) I imagine they're doing works on the fleet?

 

[LowLevel]

Flexibility has unfortunately reduced because you can no longer just split a pair of 153s to cover in service failures.

A number of 156s are out of traffic and so there are shortages of available trains.

The GA 156s are in a less than brilliant state and the native sets are very tired too.

Previously if something broke down one of the double 153 Matlock diagrams was split to provide a sub or the Liverpool portion was nicked.

Now it's more likely the train will be cancelled.