The Optare Solo was always going to be a favoured choice given its excellent layout for passengers. One of my grievances with the interior design of low-floor buses is that the first available seats are a long way back from the door (the DAFs are a spectacular example of this). This is bad news for dwell times at stops, as our drivers have to wait quite a long time for passengers to get to their seat, and for those with mobility difficulties makes the process of using a bus more traumatic than it need be.
The Solo avoids this problem, with seats available immediately inside the door.
However, different versions of Solo have differing reputations for reliability, so it took us a while to home in on suitable examples.
The upshot is that we have now acquired two Cummins-powered 8.8 metre examples from Mistral. They are Daisy (YJ55 YGN) and Donald (NX55 FFO), our fleet numbers 221 and 222 respectively, both with 28 seats.
Daisy arrives tomorrow as I write this and will go straight to Qualiti Conversions at Botley for paint, and Donald will turn up some time in the next few days. Since new they have been employed by Scarlet Band of County Durham, mostly on Durham Park and Ride, and we have high hopes for these vehicles!
One will always be allocated to route 22, and when the second one is available (which we hope will be most of the time) this will appear on the C.
Here are a couple of pictures of Daisy, taken before she knew she was going to be called Daisy, when we first went to look at her. No doubt the local Gricerazzi will come up with a few hundred more shots within a few minutes of her arrival!
1 comment:
Interesting blog. Thanks for give nice information and photo. Dallas Charter Bus
Post a Comment