(03 Jan 2023, 2:34 pm)DeltaMan wrote At the risk of sounding like a sycophant, I quite like the new pdf format. It's a lot clearer and it looks print friendly too!

Shame about the paper timetables though. They would be a marginal cost, although I can imagine three versions of the Stanley and Consett guide in one year recently would punch quite a hole....

Hopefully, they'll make a return in some form like elsewhere in the UK with other local bus companies and local authorities.

You're probably looking at £500 per 10,000 timetables, not only for the printing but the folding process. Multiply that by the number of services, and again by the number of changes (even tweaks) every year, and it becomes a small fortune.

The area guides that they produced won't have been cheap either. Probably looking at £2000-£3000 per 5000, for the print and post-processing.

Of course none of this includes the cost of design or any studio work. 

Whilst I think paper timetables are nice to have, they don't really serve any purpose when an operator is not disciplined enough to avoid frequent timetable (or price) changes. You might have just spent £3000 on an area guide for Consett for example, and it's immediately out of date because they've needed to tweak a couple journeys on the 47.