(12 Jul 2024, 7:54 pm)Dan wrote The link road between Great Park and Kingston Park hasn’t been open that long, so the opportunity wasn’t there years ago.

Stagecoach can presumably offer a Great Park to Newcastle link (as an extension of their X47) at a much lower cost than Go North East with their dedicated service, so re-allocating the S106 funding from Go North East to Stagecoach probably makes a fair amount of sense from a sustainability point of view.

Obviously gives Go North East a bit of a problem - there is already a surplus of electric buses following frequency reductions (hence two being used on the NHS Hopper contract), and a half-hourly Q3 from Haymarket to Wallsend via St Peters would only require three buses (which would mean six were spare - and that assumes the Q3 isn’t moved to Percy Main at that point).

Paired with the loss of some school contracts, hopefully that is an end to the driver-related short-notice cancellations at Riverside!

Must be at least 2 years now? Feels like it, at least, anyway but I'm probably very wrong there.

Yeah that's true with the Q3, guess it depends what they decide to do though. Assume there will no doubt be other changes from the same time as September is usually when the big changes North of the Tyne happen and I'm sure there's lot of speculative ideas what you could do with the Q3 ie. merging it with the 41/41A or 355, or whatever.