(08 Jan 2022, 6:45 pm)Adrian wrote Absolutely. The sell-out at St James' should have rang alarm bells when the decision was made to revert to a Sunday timetable at extremely short notice, and it should have been a priority to ensure there was additional capacity available on the X1 before and after the match.

Having that many people in a confined space just isn't safe at the moment, even with the windows open, and that's before you get into the issue about passengers being allowed to stand upstairs. 


Drivers have been put in the firing line today by this decision. An unacceptable amount of notice, leaving most customers unaware, and then no one available at customer services to contact instead. 

Sadly I think it stems from an industry attitude of not being accountable to customers, and that people will continue using services out of necessity anyway.

Utterly irresponsible from GNE.  The stupidity in allowing overcrowding, which is only going to lead to higher case rates and so higher absences and more problems…it beggars belief.

The general situation of reckless overcrowding won’t have been helped by the operation of smaller vehicles on unaffected decker routes as well.  In the space of 5 mins in Gateshead this afternoon I noted a corporate Streetlite on 27 and an Orbit on the 93.  Oddly there’s also been an Orbit on a 6/12 board too.  Still a good number of breakdowns reported on social media, further cutting service levels.

GNE fb page (presumably autoposting) reporting more unplanned cancellations tomorrow – though the page it is linking to hasn’t been updated since Friday so shows nothing about tomorrow…