(10 Oct 2022, 2:35 pm)Adrian wrote Not suggesting there'd be new schedules for rail strike days, but let's look at football specifically. We know Saturdays are busy and we know when there's matches on by the fixtures list published in July/August. Yet there's nothing put in place to deal with the bottlenecking on busy corridors on a normal Saturday with Football. It was always extremely busy with Saturday football, even 20 years ago, where we had a lot more options in terms of buses. We've got just as many people with a lot less options now, so when an X1 or couple of 21s inevitably go missing, it creates a problem for the rest of the day.When 21's go missing or X1 and 3 pull out Not In Service, there is just one/two around the corner most the time, 3 X1's pulled into Eldon Square they left 30 late/15 late /On time.
I'd be surprised if anyone doesn't want to do right by the customer, and I disagree with the comment on here that often suggest otherwise, but at some point we need to stop trying to force square pegs into round holes. There's events throughout the calendar year, football being a prime example, where we need a better solution.
Its when services interwork, same when Sunderland are playing, 24/9 get late it affects the 5 & 26. Really the 9&5 should interwork and 24 & 26, even worse when they're playing on a sunday as 35A/61A/60/9/24/26/5/5A all interwork with each other. Prime Example X30/X31 were absolutely hammered on Saturday there wasn't one for 3 hours or something ridiculous like that, and when they did run they entered Newcastle 40 mins late, causing the coming X45 not run.
GNE are in a tough position however they need to people to get the bus advertise a connection with the X50 on services, as the traffic into Newcastle is atrocious and the CAZ thing isn't going to do anything as you can be in any car and not being charged meanwhile bus companies are spending thousands upgrading their vehicles. There should be a football timetable however the issue with this is that drivers are limited to 5 hours so if you were going to have e.g X45, it took it 2 hours to get into Newcastle, it should be in Sunniside on the return, so do you plan for a 40-60 mins break in Stanley. You can't be having breaks in Newcastle they just don't have the facilities however looking at the X45 you can't have a massive break in COnsett as it extends to Hownsgill. Similar to the X1, it can't have a massive break at Washington, neither can the 21 at Chester-Le-Street or Brandon.
The worst example is probably the 56 which gets hammered when Sunderland & Newcastle are at home and trains /metro are cancelled however that can have 40 mins. But they don't have the PVR of vehicles to offer this E400 pretty sure there are just 2 or 3 spares out of 14, we've seen Country Rangers etc. If you look at the 56 its hard to offer always a full single decker as we saw 2 X20's and a Graphite on it today.