(23 May 2021, 10:55 am)Andreos1 wrote I wonder if it is more to do with the over-reliance on the night time economy for those services not working.
These new evening/later run and night time services have the potential to not only work with the night time economy, but also for those getting to/from work.

Personally I think it might be more of the routes.

The N20, N21, N56 and N58 we're all lucky as both ends of the routes had bars and a night time economy in Durham, Sunderland, Whitley Bay and Newcastle with Low Fell and Chester Le Street on the N21, Concord on the N56 and Houghton on the N20

The Stagecoach routes only have Newcastle so you might be lucky and pick up 10 passengers in Newcastle on the outbound journey but you can pretty much guarantee that the inbound journey would be dead and your not getting any intermediate journeys either. I'm not sure how expensive they were but your looking at least 20+ passengers from Newcastle to make it viable when you start to cost keeping a depot open, staff costs, lack of inbound / intermediate passengers etc.

Sadly think the 4 and 60 are going to have similar problems as there's not exactly much between Concord and Houghton for the 4 (depends on Amazon really) and there's going to be very little traffic heading into Sunderland early in the morning from Seaham for the 60, reminds of the N58 which failed miserably, but hoping I'm wrong.