If a normal bus was to be painted for the Coaster, I think it would have made more sense to paint a W reg 320** ALX400 to have a common Coaster fleet, this would also have stopped another model of bus being introduced into Weston depot. This would have made it easier for spares and maintenance. The older ALX400s seem to cope on the 1 and 20 as they are both relatively flat routes and where there is an incline, they are short and the gradient isn’t that great. The only problem is the drivers do not like them in wet weather as they leak.
The Trident in an unbranded form, could easily have been used in Bath on the Uni services until another ALX400 or Gemini could be found.
A delivery of new buses is in order, particularly deckers as over recent years all the new buses introduced have been for special and contract services e.g Bath/Bristol Unibus, Bristol P&R, Bristol/Weston Flyer, Bris/Portway P&R and Metrobus. The last new buses introduced for scheduled services was the 48/48A/49 Fishponds Road corridor services. If a few singles could be sourced either Streetlites or longer E200s, these could replace the last few Darts and could also replace the longer Streetlites on Bath City services which could make an inroad into replacing the older B7RLEs.
With the changes in April, hopefully buses will be freed up to allow some cascades.
Don't know about repainting the W regs. Good vehicles that they've been, they're 19 years old and are really showing their age. It's ok for the open toppers as they're only used for 4 months a year but not for the year round service. I might have been better to repaint and refurbish the last of the Barbie liveried examples 32283-5/91 rather than a Trident.
In terms of new fleet, I'm assuming that it's more CNG powered Scania/E400s as per 39401 and the CT Plus examples. As you say, the last new deckers for regular city services (i.e. not metrobus or specific contracts) were the late 2016 e400s for the Fishponds Road routes. The 42-45 are increasingly being worked by the ex London Geminis as the B9s seem to working the Y routes more frequently so new fleet would certainly be welcome.
I don't know if we'll see any new single deckers given the challenges on capacity and the age of the DD fleet anyway. Certainly, it doesn't look at they'll be Streetlites if they did - First have bought very few in recent times with FWoE offloading 13 of them. Granted, some have been swapped for more deckers thoughthey've swapped some for Welsh e200s, suggesting they might not be the preferred choice. In terms of replacing the older Eclipses, I'd expect that the some or all of the 9 x 59 plates at Wells may well be used to replace the 18 non refurbished Eclipses (viz 66934-43, 66723-5/8-31, 69253) when new deckers in Bristol allow sufficient B9s to be released, repainted and refurbished and sent to Wells.
In other news, got my first sighting of 32673 today, heading towards Pennyquick from the Globe. Judging by the time, assume it was running empty in readiness for a U2 working - a bit late for the R2.
