(18 May 2022, 10:38 pm)stagecoachbusdepot wrote Except it's not an especially honest description of the situation to claim "To help with this" - who is it helping?  It implies this is a choice GNE are making because of expected low passenger numbers, making it not worth them running the scheduled timetable - which I think would be in breech of the TC Regs - whereas this is actually because GNE appear to be unable to trust their own staff to turn up to work.

As for the more general point about the whole city emptying leaving only a minority in the region, it's probably worth bearing in mind, Sunderland have been allocated a little over 46,000 tickets.  Ignoring the fact that a good chunk of these will not even live in Sunderland, that does still leave well over 230,000 (of over 80%) of the population not uprooting to London for the day.

Let's hope Sunderland never return to the heady days of filling the SoL or, with similar numbers of punters tied up for a couple of hours than we are talking about heading down to Wembley, presumably GNE would switch to a Sunday service every second Saturday afternoon.

It is just, as others have rightly said, a really poor attempt to polish a pretty massive turd.