Thank you Neil for that very informative reply.

Currently I am reading 'Green no More' by Peter Aves, which details the struggles of London Country to both maintain a service and at the same time attempt to balance the books. It would appear that the vehicle availability problems encountered did not focus strictly upon the new designs. While it was certainly true that the modern single deck fleet caused emormous problems,in the mid 1970's period it was the lack of available Routemaster type vehicles which seems to have caused significant difficulities in spite of the efforts to adopt one man operation. It would seem that London Country was dependent upon LT for the supply of Routemaster spares, which seem not to have been forthcoming because LT did not have enough for their own fleet. This left LC with a 25% shortfall (52 vehicles) of the Routemasters required for scheduled service. By contrast there was actually a small surplus of rear engined DDs.

With such levels of unserviceable vehicles one wonders how the engineering staff managed to acquire anything scheduled for rota inspection, which must have made the situation worse still.