(09 Dec 2016, 6:43 pm)Andreos1 wrote Not quite a Malarkey Marathon...
A network of Express services that interwork with each other. There will be a North of the Tyne network and a South of the Tyne one too.
South of the Tyne:
The current X9 and X10.
The X21 and a new X22.
The X22 will operate Bishop Auckland to Middlesbrough and will reinstate the link lost with the withdrawal of the OK1.
It will also link with various parts of the GNE network.
Bishop - Durham - A181 - Peterlee - A19 - Stockton - Middlesbrough.
Stops will be in the places shown, plus:- Rushyford, Thinford, Durham Uni/South Road, Wingate/Salters Lane, Peterlee slip road and town Centre and then as X10 to Boro.
As this will serve both the slip-roads and Peterlee town centre, the X10 will operate non-stop between Norton and Testos Roundabout.
Still working on my masterplan for North of the Tyne.
Surely the OK1 was withdrawn for a reason? If there was a link worth reinstating, I don't think they would have removed it in the first place 😛
You'd also have to have buses at every terminus to regulate because there would be so much lost milage without it, given the distance one bus could end up doing. It's a great idea in theory, but in concept? It's going to cause a great deal of hassel when things go wrong - they will go horribly wrong. Even with regulation, lost milage would be great. For example, if a bus was 35 minutes late, it would be sent NIS once at it's terminus (assuming a 30 min frequency of timetables) to its next terminus. You then end up with a gap back at the second terminus as the regulated bus set off at the right time, but the dead bus is travelling light so end up with the extra regulation bus simply following along with the service bus. It's not so bad on the 6 for example, where most of the 6 is indirect so it's easy to make up time going light directly, however, when you're running a service in the most direct route (which seems to be what you listed), it becomes extremely hard to gain any time. This means there has to be a run missed out if the bus is to have any chance of making up time.
If this isn't complicated enough, imagine every single bus going through this cycle. You either need an excessively high PVR of vehicles to handle regulation, or just have a lot of lost milage when there is an issue developing.
Interworking is great, but there are limitations that unfortunately get exploited. On independant allocations, there is almost no lost milage because they can just run the buses to no particular board to provide a concurrent service. To avoid the cluster of chaos that would occur (think, there have been several X9/X10 runs with lost milage recently as GNE twitter posted), you need to have no interworking and just one or two vehicles spare for regulation of start times. If you held each of your triangle of routes to their own allocation, it would be a good system, just a bit impractical to shift drivers around, but a lot easier than sending someone from say riverside to darlington to regulate a service because the interworking can't hold up.
Even over friday and saturday, 3 X70s; 2 6s and 1 X31 were lost milage. The main issue was that buses coming from stanley on the 6 couldnt get back up to consett for their departure on time (that's 90 minutes) from newcastle, so they sent two light up and one light down. This left a huge gap (90 minutes) of X70s because there wasnt a single spare driver, never mind 3, to cover the lost milage. If the X70 was seperare from the 6, it wouldn't be an issue because the only place it could be due is Consett and Newcastle, not Consett Newcastle Stanley and back. The service would have just run 35 mins late, and lost milage wouldn't be a thing. It's the fact that the vehicles have to layover for both regulation and fuel consumption that it makes it impossible to really handle.
I drew a good diagram to explain this (I promise this does make sense lol), I need to adjust one or two things but should have it up tomorrow. There wasn't any need for all of this explaining when I have a diagram, but that's life for you!
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