(05 Aug 2022, 12:46 pm)streetdeckfan wrote It's never stopped them before!
I remember when they closed Crook depot, they were sending drivers down to Bishop that didn't have a clue where to go because they hadn't learned the route yet! I remember one of them saying they'd only ever been to Bishop once before and they were just following a map they had printed out.
I lost count of the amount of times they stopped and asked passengers which way to go, or just going the wrong way completely

Prior to Crook closing and the X21 moving to Chester, Chester operated the X21 to Bishop Auckland on Sundays, interworking with the 21 at Durham. Through fares available. New drivers (and, by extension, former unit 2 drivers when the two main rotas were amalgamated in 2014) should have been route-learned to account for this but it is possible that some rarely worked any such duties prior to Crook's closure. Some former unit 1 drivers at Chester would have worked the route to Bishop during the Pink Angel days. 

Your anecdote reminded me of an occasion one Saturday not long after the 8/78 changed to Streetlites where an old hand on the 4-day rota asked me to go to Stanley and back with him on the 8 to keep him right. At the time, on a sixteen line rota, there was just a single duty where they covered the Stanley end of the 8 route, it being on a Saturday that they would each encounter once every sixteen weeks.