(04 Jan 2021, 12:32 pm)Adtrainsam wrote Indeed. It's a lot easier to change the bus times to match with the trains rather than the other way round. Not too familiar with the 71, but it does seem that the bus times could easily be changed slightly to match up with train times. It's probably more difficult to change on more complex services, and not really needed on the frequent services, unless late at night. Would it be difficult to transfer bus information to arriving trains? Even better integration.

I don't think the 71 is timed to work in sync with any other service to be honest. 
There's not much of a pattern with the 78 between Chester and Woodstone Village in either direction, there's possibly some headway with the 35 around Burnside. Not aware of anything in and around Seaham. 

However with it being the only service to go anywhere near Seaham railway station, I'd have thought there was some scope to adapt or tweak to tie in with the Northern Rail services.
To promote the links with a station is all fine and well and it does have the potential to attract passengers - assuming the connection times are attractive.
In the case of the 71, there's the option of attracting quite a few passengers.

The data below is taken from the Seaham Station wiki page. There was talk elsewhere of the 21 attracting a tiny proportion of the cars travelling to/from the Arnison Centre. Yet there's a cracking example here of a chronically under-utilised resource from a wide area. 

Passengers
2015/16  137,948
2016/17  145,362
2017/18  140,894
2018/19  137,652
2019/20  138,938