Caught the tail end of a programme on BBC Parliament earlier (it may be on i-player, haven't checked - 20:10 - 20.55), primarily about Dr Beeching, but it also focused on the investment made by successive Governments since then, both in the nationalised and privatised sector.

It didn't really throw any new light or inform the audience about any new revelations, but it was interesting.

It just got me thinking, was Beeching right? Was he shortsighted? Why have successive Governments barely touched the railway infrastructure since in the way of funding? Why since privatisation, has there been a massive increase in subsidies and also investment in the system - not like anything seen before?

Any thoughts or ideas?

Quite a major bug hit the forum earlier in which a re-install had to take place. Liam has performed this re-install and the forum works again. However, the usual styling of the forum, alongside mobile optimisation etc, will not function correctly until tomorrow at the earliest.
Liam is having a few personal problems, so got the forum back up and running so that it was usable but unfortunately did not have time to fix everything else. In the mean time, we apologise for any inconvenience caused and I will try and get some things done on the fleet lists and Bygone Era tomorrow to make up for it!

Cheers,
D

I thought it would be a nice idea to start up this thread. Feel free to post your days out, and also recommendations!

NEB News - http://northeastbuses.co.uk/news.php
Bi-weekly, a news update on Arriva North East, Go North East and Stagecoach North East will be provided - containing all fleet and network updates. Working alongside our fleet lists, we anticipate to update our fleet lists when updates occur and summarise these in a report at the end of the fortnight.


The long awaited release of North East Buses' fleet news section (shortened 'NEB News' for all of you cool kids out there!) has come! The section has seen massive updates occur within the last month, changing our plans from a forum-style update to a new page completely - with opportunities to view all news on one page in an organised fashion and also with opportunities to filter by operator which news you read.

I must take this opportunity to also point out that the news section is indeed still a "work in progress", but has been released publicly to allow for feedback. Because of this, you will continue to see minor cosmetic changes occur to the news section over the course of the next few days, until we think it's fully complete.

When originally designing the news section, our primary concern was to replicate what was already available on the market and improve where we believed areas could be improved. Like all other websites that provide a news section, we intended on focusing directly on fleet news. It soon became apparent to us that we needed to be different, and it was because of this, we decided to include general news items also.

After much discussion, we decided that it was not possible to achieve all that we had proposed on a forum post as we had originally planned. As such, we worked from scratch on the new, revised project - making individual pages to accompany our fleet list section, with this news on them.

You will notice that the news section appears to be split in two. One side holds news with headlines and bigger images, and the other side holds news with smaller images and no headlines. This is what we wanted. We wanted users to be able to distinguish between "big news" and "small news".

The big news (an example is shown in the screenshot below) should be the part of the news that everyone will want to read.


The small news (an example is again shown in the screenshot below) is news that perhaps isn't as noteworthy ('minor' network changes etc) as other events that have occurred in the fortnightly period.


Above I mentioned you could filter the results you see. This can be achieved by clicking the operator's button at the top of the page. If you want to see every news article for that fortnight, fair enough. If you don't and would prefer to see news from Stagecoach only - you click the Stagecoach button!
I associate our news section with a real life newspaper. There are some people who will sit and read through every news article, but the fair majority of people want to have a "quick fix" with something that interests them, and they do this by scanning for words/photographs of interest to them.
It is a little harder to achieve that sort of concept on a website, but filtering results was the way forward!


In the future (before the next update), we will update the news page to include an archive. This will hold all previous articles from a specific date (i.e. today's update will be archived as 25/08/13). The styling and general coding of this page is still a "work in progress" and is certainly not ready to be released just yet. When it is, I'll be sure to give you all a link to it

We'd like to know your opinions on the news section.
Do you like the styling of the page? One of our ideas was to have the news linked to the operator's colour, and you can see how we have achieved this on the news page. We're not sure if it's perfect, but we're also out of ideas on how it could be improved if we were to keep it.
Do you like the ordering of the page? All stories are grouped together on the main page by operator, which is also in alphabetical order (ANE, GNE and then SNE). One of our ideas was to have a jumbled up news section, with news from each operator being provided at various parts of the page. At present, Stagecoach will never appear at the top of the main page - that is the problem with ordering them as we have presently. Alternatives, anyone?!
If you have any other comments/suggestions, they'd be greatly appreciated - you can post them below.

Cheers everyone, and I hope you enjoy the news section!

Just driven down Ryhope Green past the stop which had the red square and white lettering denoting the 60 and 61 services being classed as Superoute. Does anyone know what happened with this initiative? I remember the GNE busses wearing a sticker above the door denoting a Superoute service...

Not as such an update, just a work in progress and we'd like to know your opinions. That's why I've put it in here instead.

I am a huge fan of sub-forums because I like things to be organised and clean. A messy forum full of various child forums highly irritates me, and I find it incredibly non-user friendly - so much so, to the point where I feel it's an arduous task to even look at the forum nevermind post. However, others do not like sub-forums, and likely feel the same way as me, but for the opposite cause.

On the most recent update of myBB (our forum provider) it seems a little bug which cannot be fixed is present (which has already been noted in the 'Problems' section by a member). If multiple child forums hidden within a sub-forum have new posts, the little indicator does not show after you read the first one. As such, unless you click the sub-forum's title, you will not know whether there are new posts apart from the one you've already read or not. The only solution made the post indicator light up even if you were the one making the post. You essentially had to read your own post after leaving the thread.

A rather annoying bug to say the least, but I feel members can adapt (or likely have adapted) to this to ensure they have always read every post within a sub-forum.

What's the difference between a forum, a sub-forum and a child forum? See below.

A forum:
http://d.pr/i/jV2d

A sub-forum:
http://d.pr/i/sYPN

And finally, a sub-forum holds child forums:
http://d.pr/i/51U5

Without a sub-forum, the three child forums held within 'off-topic chat and useful & informative links' would be displayed on the forum index, under 'the canteen'. Imagine them being below, rather than having the two sub-forums present instead:
http://d.pr/i/QHXG

This would then enlarge the forum index and make it look even bigger, and potentially make the forum look a lot 'messier' or 'cluttered' too.
Would we prefer having a messy/cluttered forum, or an organised forum which can cause inconvenience owing to the additional clicking required? Both ways aren't the most user-friendly of options, but you only have two options - have sub-forums, or don't have them.

You will already notice that we have removed the sub-forums from the Local Bus Scene area, an area we recently changed and received a lot of good feedback on. To avoid the forum being massively enlarged (as it did, by a further three rows), everything was made to be a little bit smaller. Some visually impaired (even if it is just to a remote degree) may find this offputting, and could potentially turn their backs on NEB - something we don't want.
The advantage of them being all on the forum index is that you needn't worry about missing a post if you haven't already adapted to clicking the sub-forum, but I can't help but feel it looks a lot messier.

Thoughts and opinions? Sub-forum or no sub-forum?
Do help us out! There's a poll above if you've got a straight forward 'Yes' or 'No' answer rather than any additional feedback (of course you can do both, however!)

There are a stack of blogs out there on the internet - some better than others.

Stumbled across this blog when looking for details on the GNE X2.
The guy seems an avid enthusiast, travelling the country using public transport.

On this particular blog, he travelled to the North East - using some long gone services and vehicles, even though the adventure was a mere 5/6 years ago.

He wasn't too keen on Washington...

Www.leytravels.blogspot.com/2008/03/heading-north.html?m=1

Don't know if I should be admitting this at 31, but I enjoy wrestling, lol, is there many other fans among us.

I was lucky to be growing up at a time when Wrestling was hot it was on fire, during the Attitude era, Austin v McMahon, DX at there peak.

British Bulldog was my favourite wrestler back in the day, I also liked The Rock, Stone Cold, HHH and HBK.

I don't watch it as much these days, I pretty much lost interest after Eddie Guerrero died and after the Chris Benoit double murder suicide.

I have seen it live at Newcastle and The Odyssey in Belfast and even met some of the Raw Roster at the Hilton in Belfast, which was an experience.

Is there any other fans among us

175102 has been taken out of service at Chester bound for Manchester.
No replacement organised, the guard just refuses to have the train in use because of a door fault (believe that's what I heard).

EDIT: A door is shutting on its own. If a person was to get trapped in it and injure themselves, it is the guard that would get into trouble.
Fitters are coming now to see the train. If they can't fix it, no replacement will be organised.

Wonder if anyone can help me here.

I don't want to promote law breaking here, but years ago I used to be a runner between here and Belgium/France and Luxembourg on Cigarette and booze cruises about 10 years ago, used to go on a coach from Durham Services, and whenever we went, we always met up with another bus on similar nefarious activities from somewhere in Tyneside, it had a tiger livery, and was just wondering whatever became of this coach, is it still pounding the roads or out of service now...

Anyone help please.....