(02 Jan 2025, 3:44 pm)busmanT wrote But the Q3 clearly wasn't commercial. It reportedly was almost commercial pre-covid  but increased costs and reduced patronage (I imagine that a lot of Great Park residents now work from home part of the week) mean it can have been nowhere near in latter time.

X47 and Q3 both serving great park wouldn't have worked has there wouldn't have been enough passengers for both of them.

Anyway, Great Park west of the A1 is private land and they (Great Park Consortium) decided to give the bus service contract to Stagecoach with exclusivity.

This seems lost on the vocal minority of folk posting on the GP pages sadly. While it is a large area, the reality is that the Q3s were generally fairly lightly loaded from what I saw and they were just 3 per hour. Now we're 4 months into the Stagecoach X47 operation with 4 buses per hour, and I think the busiest service I've been on left GP with about 20 people on it (granted I don't use it to commute, so I'm not seeing peak loads). I still think it's got a good chance of being commercially viable in the end, as by the time it's through Kingston Park they tend to have a full seated load if it's a saloon, and it's only the cost of 1 additional bus to Stagecoach versus what the X47 was before the change.

The 49 is worryingly quiet during the day, there are numerous times when I've caught it and been the only person on the bus for the full trip. It's a bit of a shame, as realistically that's the perfect route from Great Park to Newcastle, but it's nowhere near frequent enough. 

A continuation of the Q3, alongside the X47 and 49, would have seen Great Park served by 8 buses per hour to Newcastle, which is complete overkill - certainly at present.