tbtc
Veteran Member
So, they've got over seven thousand buses/coaches to paint... they paint three into the new liveries for the big photo shoot (one "blue", one "green", one "yellow")... and then instead of starting painting other buses out of the old livery, one of the first things that they do is repaint one of the "green" ones into the "blue" livery?
It's like they put Matt Hancock in charge of repaints, so he can count 26026 as two repainted buses!
I know it's only a minor thing but (after the way they seem to have confused themselves over something as simple as what colour to paint the front of the bus - in the livery that will apply to the vast majority of the fleet in future!), they really seem to be making a ham fisted attempt at these repaints - this isn't the level of professionalism that Stagecoach used to be so good at - it's like a step back in time to the Scottish Bus Group days (when local operators didn't worry about things like "standards").
I appreciate that it appears slow for now, but if you assume that they buy each vehicle brand new (i.e. already in the new livery) and they'll replace about 7% of the fleet each year (if the average life expectancy of a vehicle in the Stagecoach fleet is around fifteen years - some vehicles may be sold second hand before they are life expired) then even if they only repaint 5% of the fleet each year then after a couple of years a quarter of vehicles will be in the new livery - it won't take long until there's a critical mass of buses in the new schemes (assuming they focus attention on repainting the 18/68/19/69-plate buses and ignore the oldest ones in the fleet)*
* - when First introduced their "Olympia" livery in South Yorkshire in 2012, one of the first vehicles to get repainted was an R-reg B10BLE (i.e. a vehicle that should have already been scrapped was trundling around in the new livery whilst dozens of buses that were only a year or two old continued to carry the "Barbie" livery for a few years)
