Not all of them. Some services already had WAB 'prepared' before
they announce it to go WAB, like 171 851 and 858, Whereas the rest
had already 'warm up' like 61 and 855 For 61 before 35K came in
there was 4A and 44J, and most of OCs coming from 75 etc, Last year
when 4A got demoted to TRNG for good only they swap 35K for 819M,
kicking some buses out. 855's case already had a couple of buses as
'warm ups' like 28G and 136C, before the citaros kicked out the
lances and the 'quota' is still not there.
This year the WAB candidates 75 177 187 700 852 and 970, 75 had
'way prepared beforehand', 177 ditto, 187 just transformed
literally without preparing which is why you saw those old ELBOs
perming 178, and it came as a shock because it took time to settle
those fleets. 852 was already 'warmed up' this year by having 3
citaros 146Z 147X 148T as perms from AMDEP, WLDEP just transformed
852 without making giving sufficient notices before hand, It was
only the week before, Then they took action by swopping out the
scanias, and that makes the deployment very messy at that time when
both services were converted, Which means the fleets of 167 178
were being played around with, 167 got its citaro stripped, 178's
strider got redeployed again.
As for 970, The fleeting was there before hand but for some
reasons it wasn't considered for WAB until this year.
Some services WAB standards should really buck up because it is
risky (for SMRT), Especially if you look at the full day starters
itself for 61 and 855, But for 171 it has improved.
For SBST I do notice they do prepare their fleets way before
hand, and much much earlier.
Uh, perhaps my post wasn't clear in my definition of dumping, I
had meant that SMRT's habit is to dump a certain fleet of WABs onto
their pre-determined WAB service, then swap out those WABs
wholesale and then replace them with another set of permers. If you
look at Service 75 since the 1st day they got the first few
Citaros, and then subsequently what happened till today before they
finished with getting the MAN permers, you should know what I
mean.
So yes, no doubt these WAB services were prepared as in the SLs
know how to drive WABs and all, but their WAB permers, are really
like mahjong from what I keep seeing. One week swap here, the other
week swap to another service. Not just 75, some other services
also, you should know better since it's your side.
For SBST, it's very rare lately that once they put a set of
permers on a yet-to-be-WAB-certified service, they swap out the
entire set from that service and replace with another few permers
before going WAB. SBST's practice is more likely slowly adding on
one-by-one, then unless there's ad contracts/particular issues with
the model (like Voith Wrights vs ZF Wrights for Sv 168), they
wouldn't swap the entire set of permers from a service like what
SMRT has been doing lately.
