(20 Apr 2022, 8:44 am)Drifter60 wrote I’m not sure you can lay that line just at the door of enthusiasts either. It’s your own colleagues who’ve said this, there’s been articles in the local press which is more damming for the company than a couple of people on a bus forum, albeit many of which who are customers too. 

Which ever way you look at it, whatever the pros and cons, money has been ‘wasted’ on paint. It might be that painting buses into new colours every year helps boost customers, but which ever way you look at it GNE are throwing about money on paint. How many paint jobs would a 5 year old bus usually receive? 6332 has been in ‘Hop Tap and Go’ then ‘XLINES X21’ then ‘XLINES X45/X46’ and now presumably into corporate or perhaps XLINES X21 again.

I don't think I can add anything else to what I said previously - you haven't made a new point here really.

The Northern Echo love a story about buses - whether that's Go North East or Arriva - it's huge click-bait and that's how they make their money. Their reporters will happily admit that, so if one member of staff chooses to go to them or share an internal briefing with them, they will report on it.

As I said before, I don't agree with the claims that it's money 'wasted'. Nobody can deny that Go North East has done an awful amount of work on marketing and promoting its bus services and whilst it's open to debate whether new brands achieve any kind of growth, clearly the company or its management team think that this works and is something that will continue to happen. Stagecoach probably repaint an equal number of buses as Go North East, and Arriva are currently repainting/refurbishing many of their buses too. You don't hear about this though. Again, as I said before, this is really a debate about route branding - might some of these repaints have been avoided if Go North East didn't have individual route brands?

For 6332:

• delivered new in a livery to promote contactless payments
  
• repainted into X-lines X21 livery due to PVR increase on service X21 (and service's encapsulation into X-lines network)
  
• partial (back end) repaint into X-lines X45/X46 livery due to fleet re-allocations to improve reliability on service X21
  
• full repaint out of X-lines X45/X46 livery due to PVR reduction on these services.
  

So in that, two full repaints and one partial repaint in five years - but some of the comments I've seen on social media have heavily exaggerated this to the point you'd have thought it had been fully repainted 5+ times. None of these repaints have been 'needless', they've been done because the company has route branded buses...