Touched a nerve there with my "couple of quid" remark! To be honest I'm all for service rationalisation; little point in running buses just in case the odd individual decides to have a look out and aren't these just the very people who are up on their soapbox when the latest round of service revisions hits the press? Arriva will have crunched the numbers and undoubtedly listened to the requests; I believe that Service 81 did go out to local publicity and obviously it hasn't attracted enough feedback to warrant a change of the plans.

In comparing my day in Newcastle with GNE against a day here in Teesside with Arriva it was just a 'tounge in cheek' comment to be honest and I don't know enough about the operations on Tyneside to say more.