Jordan Adam
Established Member
If First were to go back to Wrightbus stuff again, they’d be best sticking to a B5TL Gemini as they already have a large Cummins/Volvo engined fleet, throwing in a major amount of Daimler engined Streetdecks isnt keeping things as simple as possible, at this moment, I would rather drive a B5TL with a ZF box as opposed to the sluggish Voith fitted 400MMCs Glasgow have, Ive spoken to a few faces recently I knew while working at FiG years ago, and a few said the same that the Voith boxes make the 400s too damn sluggish.
I do think its odd but I do see sense that other areas of glasgow which arent affected by Glasgows LEZ should Be getting new buses as well.
On a side note..
while many talk about a bus being replaced I’d be determined to have more of FIGs large number of 2006 B7RLEs kept and refurbished heavily, FAR more heavily than FiGs current attempts, as Im aware, the Euro3 Engines can be retrofitted to bring them up to Euro6 standards by Eminox or Baumot and its not as if there unreliable to start with...
Considering the amount of troubles operators are having with B5TLs it would be stupid for First to go for them now. Voith E400s are just far too slow, with many drivers disliking them because of that. On the other hand the ZF Ecolife examples are much faster, and in my view the best 2 axle decker on the market.
By the time LEZ comes in those B7RLEs will be 16 years old. To me it makes far more logical sense to move them out of Glasgow rather than refit them, although i agree that a better effort should have been made to at least retrim and deep clean them.
Aberdeen's Platinum vehicles are now all between 10 and 11 years old, but internally and mechanically they're closer to a 4/5 year old bus, while the specification of them is nothing special compared to now. Platinum did what it set out to do and the vehicles are still internally and mechanically superb. Even now that we've just passed 5 years since the Geminis were refurbished i don't think they'll need an internal refurb for quite some time yet, clearly the quality of eLeather used on them was much better than that of vehicles out the factory!