Has there ever been any indication that the Platinum concept introduced in Aberdeen might be rolled out nationally? AFAIK, it has been pretty successful in Aberdeen and the Gold and Sapphire concepts seem to be working well for Stagecoach and Arriva. There must be a fair number of urban and inter-urban routes across most operating companies that could benefit from a bit of love. It seems as if Platinum might just be another of Firsts great new ideas that just end up dying a death through lack of interest/follow through.
To be brutally honest, Gold or Sapphire (or Max) is really much the same in terms of vehicle spec as standard First (e.g. eLeather, Wifi, etc). You could argue that Gold is a marketing exercise and promotes as special what is increasingly seen as the norm!
Maybe it isnt Platinum thats needed, just a dose of the marketing skills that Stagecoach seem to have in spades.
Its a strange one.
First have been really keen to differentiate routes in the past with special liveries for different things (remember the way that the original Barbie colour scheme wasnt as simple as low floor, it was low floor, if the vehicles interior is First Group corporate purple seating, plus also some high floor double deckers with purple seats i.e. there were low floor buses that didnt qualify as they were inherited when First took over other companies and therefore retained their original seating but the new colour scheme did apply to step entrance double deckers like Royales which may make an interesting Venn Diagram for enthusiasts, but is of precious little use if you are a parent with a buggy trying to work out whether you need to turf your toddler out or not as you see the bus approach your stop.
IIRC weve seen special First liveries for environmentally friendly buses, vehicles with guidewheels etc, weve seen various different train liveries with different applications of purple/ pink its been a lot messier than the fairly straightforward Stagecoach approach (all trains in Stagecoach branded TOCs have been seen the three corporate colours applied into a fast white/ medium distance blue / local red version easily identified as Stagecoach - Sheffield Supertram is the same medium distance blue version of the train livery even the different bus liveries like the green hybrid E400Hs on my local route still look Stagecoach).
Similarly, the Stagecoach approach to their beachball livery seemed to have some logic to it at first, ensuring that the oldest vehicles continued to be painted in the striped livery, so that the dynamic modern beachball was only associated with newer buses (cant remember what the cut-off was in terms of age when the beachball livery was introduced, sorry, but at least they tried to restrict the new colours to newer vehicles).
THEN, First come up with their lilac livery fair enough time for a change (even if it was too bland and the rear design seemed more about suiting the Wright badge of double deckers so that it didnt work so well on other vehicles as well). A new livery made sense (Barbie had been around for fifteen years, which is a lot longer than a lot of much loved post-privatisation colour schemes ever lasted and longer than a few British Rail liveries lasted). BUT, First threw the new colours on *anything* - R-reg B10BLEs were some of the first to get the lilac treatment in Sheffield whilst Geminis remained untouched. There seemed to be no logic to it.
This would have been the perfect time to restrict the new colours to only buses with leather seats/ wifi, so that people would associate the new livery with the premium offering. Except that First (in an unusual move) seem to make no distinction between their new standards and wheezing old buses from the 1990s everything gets the same livery.
Stagecoach have been a lot slower to introduce the leather seated treatment, but make a huge song and dance out of it, with the GOLD livery. My other half suggested that we could have a day out on the heavily branded E400 we saw in Sheffield City Centre recently (heading to Matlock on the X17)...
...until I pointed out that the wifi/ seats were just like the ones we use most days on our local First route but Stagecoach make much more of a deal about their (more limited) premium operations so non bus people notice them a lot more. First, once masters of hype, have underplayed this Great Leap Forward.
As
TheGrandWazoo says, this kind of specification is becoming the norm on a significant number of new buses in the UK (although to read the Todmordon Chord thread on this Forum, youd think the Transdev X43 were in some way unique!
) which improves the offering on bus services compared with most trains (in the same way that theres probably a much bigger percentage of trains in northern England that have bus seats compared to buses still running that have that kind of bench seating!).
Stagecoach seem more reluctant to invest heavily in leather seats, maybe in the same way that they continued buying high floor buses (B10Ms) in the late '90s whilst First started buying low floor vehicles in large numbers (though whether the early Super Low Floor Darts have stood the test of time is perhaps another story).
It seems slightly odd that Stagecoach seem a bit more reluctant to change the internals on vehicles when they appear (to me) to be more innovative in terms of other offerings (TaxiBus/ MegaBus/ MagicBus/ MegaBusGold/ MegaTrain), but maybe they think that tailored offerings will turn more heads than applying it indiscriminately in larger numbers?
(I preferred the non-Barbie liveries of the late 90s where First had a white/off-white/cream base and two or three bold colours along the bottom which often rose toward the back of the vehicle e.g. the yellow/orange/red of Leeds, the yellow/ green/ blue of Edinburgh, the grey/ blue/ green of Great Eastern trains they were local but the three striped colours looked quite First sometimes with a willowleaf incorporated a nice compromise between over-complicated brandings that Trent Barton/ GoAhead use and the dullness of great slabs of one colour like Firsts operations in Manchester/ Glasgow had at that time)
