It may be good money after bad but I wonder what extent of these issues are related to cost-cutting on this project - the interior on the Renatus units certainly does show how cheaply it's been engineered in places - rewiring old units can't be easy but A/C systems aren't that difficult to get right these days and that I gather is one of the most problematic areas of all. Presumably, like the PIS, it doesn't work right because it isn't built properly to begin with. As tatty as they are, the 321s were built to a reasonable standard when they were new. No '321 fan club' here, many simply decried the waste of, presumably, scrapping units that while old were not unfit for duty - the persistence of the 319s with an even worse reliability record are evidence of that. With the SWR, LM and other announcements, however, it all pales into insignificance - the majority of the 321 fleet is likely to be recycled by 2021 but there will be 350s, 360s, 379s, 458s and potentially even 707s off-lease at that stage, while the shortage of DMUs elsewhere, particularly in the North, rages on. This makes scrapping the 321s no less a waste, but certainly inconsequential, comparatively speaking.
