(30 Jan 2022, 11:01 pm)Adrian wrote My thoughts on the X84/X85 changes: https://www.busesandbeyond.co.uk/2022/01...or-hexham/

Comments/views welcome.

a good round up of the issues there.

when the old Sunday service used to run in the days of darts, it was simply a feeder service for the the 74a service, although often did pick up a fair number of people through the villages and through throckley/Lemington.

the 9.30/10.30 ish buses out of Hexham pre pandemic most days would often be full depending on who got through Hexham first - in the days of the scanias there was little passenger loyalty - just whatever turned up first for most twirlies, although it did have many regulars and regular season ticket holders.  Fast forward to when the bus station moved location, there was initially a big drop off because twirlies didn’t want to have to walk to the ‘new’ bus station.  Combine this and turnover of drivers periodically, and problems with ticket acceptance, timetable changes etc led to gne losing almost all of their business passengers to the Arriva x85 at the time, despite them running anything that happened to be spare in the garage that day.

ENCTS passengers were not overly keen when the new citaros came into service as despite their refurb, their seats were rock hard and uncomfortable for most.  Add to this serious reliability issues with the third party eminox system which resulted in the buses derating frequently in service.

 the encts never, and still have not returned in anything like the numbers they used too - particularly for the 9.30/10.30 busy journeys.  There also isn’t the same level of tourist traffic that used it as a feeder to get the ad122 bus either, even though this year they dropped the tickets finally to a sensible level.  The other variable is turnover of drivers.  There are some excellent drivers at Hexham depot, but when you start to have new drivers on the route, particularly inexperienced drivers.  It’s a tight route both in terms of time and width of road and margin for error is very small.  Passengers on the route for the most part are quite canny but don’t tolerate poor service or tardiness if there’s another option.

Apart from morning and afternoon peaks solo would be fine and easier to operate on these routes.