SELNEC services threatened by defective vehicles
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• Some 130 of SELNEC PTE's Atlantean and Fleetline buses are now standing idle awaiting spare parts — many of them with gearbox defects.
A SELNEC spokesman told CM on Tuesday: "This is clearly going to affect the reliability of our performance over the next few months. Every effort is being brought to bear on British Leyland to improve the spares situation but our engineering staff hold out little hope of an improvement before the end of the year."
In the meantime SELNEC is having to keep old vehicles in service in order to fill the gap.
A British Leyland spokesman said: "We are aware of the difficulties experienced by this operator in obtaining spare parts for its vehicles, and in particular spares for Daimler gearboxes (which is affecting 40 vehicles). The shortage is to some extent being aggravated by the movement of component machining facilities from Daimler's Coventry factory to the Leyland plant".
Last Saturday Leyland's service personnel had a day long meeting with SELNEC staff to investigate the problem. With the Coventry-Leyland move now almost complete it is expected that there will be a significant improvement in parts supply within the next two months.