(26 Nov 2018, 8:01 pm)Malarkey wrote Just going to put it out there, I used the 16:45 X24A this evening from Sunderland to Gateshead and I have to say compared to the X24 it was awful.

In terms of reliability the service shot straight away coming out of Sunderland where it hits peak traffic on Chester Road before turning left to along onto Durham Road, the routing around Doxford International is strange one by having it observe the stop outside of Greggs where all Sunderland bound services stop before having double back on it's self to come off the business park where again it hit traffic, note only 3 people got on this

Eventually after approximately 30 minutes on the service at this point we got onto the A19 and cruised down albeit running late, we then reached Heworth where the driver who was already running late then decided to go along Sunderland Road rather than straight down the bypass, the journey took 55 minutes in total for which felt like an eternity, gueninely think SNE need to go back to the drawing board in regards to a peak time service via Doxford International.

I did the 16:12 journey off Sunderland fairly recently and my experiences sort of echo the above however, we only picked up a few passengers who wanted to head along Chester Road, think only me and one other person did the full journey, around 5 or 6 got on at Doxford International on my journey.

I personally think whilst it is annoying that the journey time from Sunderland City Centre to Newcastle is longer, I personally think the X24A going to Doxford isn't a bad call, some have suggested the bulk of the X24 loadings tend to be people from Sunderland heading into Newcastle in the morning / early afternoon who then come back in the afternoon / evening, so surely it's better to be picking up a few fare paying customers at Doxford rather than running straight along Chester Road as normal and picking up pretty much nobody, although perhaps a few alterations could be made to speed it up slightly but still serve Doxford although I don't think there is much you can do there.