(19 Dec 2016, 12:04 pm)Michael wrote Do you ever think that in some point, most area's will have a direct bus to Beamish, the likes of South Shields, even if it's just like the 128 and runs on Saturdays?.

Durham, Chester-le-Street, Consett, Stanley, Newcastle, Sunderland, Gateshead and everywhere imbetween has a direct link to Beamish. (8/78A/128/28/28A)
Isn't this already most areas? 😛
It becomes impractical when you consider times. It takes half an hour to drive it on motorway. If you did a direct non-stop link from SS to CLS then Beamish, it'd scrape 45
minutes, but it'd also be absolutely useless.
Maybe you'd get a few people on, on a nice day, probably about half concessions. On a bad day, probably not many. The 128 has poor loads when it isn't sunny. Is it really worth sending a bus flying down the motorway for that?
In terms of shifts and PVR it works, you can just put two extra buses into the 50 to allow one to be sent off on this new service and there be no distruption to the origional service.
I honestly think these kinds of special service would be instantly created with ease if they were practical to take.
If you add other destinations in, it just pushes the journey time further and further away from getting a lift, and it's these kinds of service where most passengers do travel to the end of the route, obviously.
It's no more than two steps away from anyone who isn't up in the mountains. Whitely Bay is 309 then 28s, S.S. is 27 then 28 or 50 then 8. Bishop Auckland is X21 then 128. For this reasoning, I don't think there will be any more links added - simply because they are neither practical nor sensible to add with the current system.
Bit wordy as always, but I was actually thinking about this earlier when I was up Stanley 😛

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