It wouldn’t make much sense to allocate a “Durham 2025 City of Culture” branded bus to the Coaster 1 or 12/12A, as they don’t touch County Durham but at the same time it doesn’t need to be exclusively used in County Durham! Not to mention, there’s not a huge amount of routes that operate solely in County Durham. Going outside the area is fine, as said above it promotes the bid. In a somewhat bizarre move, the City of Culture competition now allows for counties/groups of towns/areas to bid as one - Northumberland was part of the ‘long list’ in a bid with the “Borders” which also included Cumbria, Dumfries and Galloway and the Scottish Borders, I believe. So for County Durham’s bid, the 78 is probably a decent route for it - serves a good chunk of North Durham - and it does need another bus for its increased PVR.

Let’s remember Sunderland City of Culture 2021 bid also had branded bus, it was a regular on 20s and 60s, both routes of which of course spend a good chunk of time in County Durham and of course the former ends up in South Tyneside too! Deptford didn’t just allocate the bus to 39s each and every day for the sake of it being it exclusively Sunderland.