(25 Jul 2025, 7:33 pm)Malarkey wrote Dan confirmed this afternoon whilst on his X22 to CLS that he has a total of 10 Ex Go-Ahead London "DOE Class" Dennis Trident Optare Olympus', 7 are already here in the North East whilst 3 others are in Blackburn presuming at Read Commercials for future contracts. 

A total of 9 of us were on the X22 at 13:25 from MetroCentre and did check to see if GNE had any plain clothes staffed watching his services and totting up the numbers again today but did seem to be the case.

I spoke with the very kind bus station supervisor at the Metrocentre today.

It’s an agreement that this bus station supervisor is ‘fair and impartial’, but monitoring passenger loadings on a competitor’s route for ten minutes every hour probably isn’t considered to be ‘fair and impartial’.

Though it was abundantly clear what was happening, I decided to ask if he was making note of customer numbers. The bus station supervisor, seemingly somewhat embarrassed, did confirm that he had been tasked with this job. I mentioned that he possibly should consider feeding back that there might be catch traffic elsewhere on both routes and so making note of loadings at Metrocentre isn’t a true representation of patronage.

It follows other acts which may be considered as predatory and intimidating, including Head Office employees riding on the services in ‘plain clothes’ (posing as regular customers, not using their staff passes), and commercial team colleagues, perhaps coincidentally, driving training buses along the routes of the X22 and X43.

I dread to think how much management time has already been wasted on the X22 and X43. The priorities don’t seem to be quite right here, and if stakeholders were to be aware of this, there would be a significant amount of reputational damage to Go North East.