(24 Apr 2021, 9:53 pm)Storx wrote Your missing one big thing here and comparing times at 2pm in afternoon or whenever which isn't commuter times. The X21 from Bedlington Station in the morning takes 52 minutes and that's if there's no traffic at all. If there's the usual chaos through Gosforth High Street or an accident on the A1 then start adding time on and it's unreliable and useless so you end up having to catch a bus 30 minutes earlier for the X21 now than you'd need to.

Using a train on the otherhand if the trains say it'll take 25 minutes, it'll take 25 minutes so if you start work at 9am and the train gets in at 8:38am then it's a route if you could take. If you start work at 9am and the bus gets in at the 8.38am then you'll have the catch the bus that gets you in at 8.08am to account for the traffic issues mentioned above so it starts to add up considerably as you won't have enough time to get to work if it's 10/15 minutes late which happens regularly.

Even known the time difference on the actual bus/train isn't too different once you account for getting to a station. The train would leave at 8.13am but the bus leaves at 7.16am and that's a considerable difference for a commuter.

Also I believe the fares are going to be integrated with the Metro zones so it means if you work on the Metro route you can change at Northumberland Park / Central and go to a massive area of Tyne and Wear with one change on one ticket rather than the £10.90 you pay daily currently.

This railway is pretty much unheard of up here but it's more comparable to the lines like the Manchester to Glossop Line where Glossop has 1.12 million users a year and about 5 other stations each have about 100k - 200k users a year or the Manchester to Buxton Line which each have roughly 200k passengers a year on average bar 2 which are much much lower.

I think I'd used Saturday timetables as they loaded up first on Bustimes - my bad. Just as a note, however, the morning peak runs into Newcastle have an extra 10 minutes or so to do Gosforth to Newcastle to allow for traffic, even pre-Covid I've never arrived into Newcastle more than a few minutes late during the morning peak due to this padding in the timetable. 

I'd looked for fare info but couldn't seem to find any. I think that'll be appealing for some, but again if folk already have to catch a bus to the station are they going to fork out for an additional ticket? 

Aware there are benefits to it, but can't get away from thinking that the location of stations in relation to the bulk of the population in each town is far from ideal. Equally, I feel like frequency and potentially fares could put people off making short hops - who is going to go from Ashington to Blyth on it, for example?