(05 May 2026, 9:30 am)Ambassador wrote If the 21 can't maintain time or service without being heavily regulated or plagued with cancellations - how do we expect a mammoth route like this to cope? 

Is there any proof people want links to Seaham or Dalton Park? Chester is 9 minutes from town on a train, Arnison and MetroCentre are very accessible. It feels like an old Malarkey Marathon

Some fair points, honestly don't think there'd be much demand from CLS to those places to be fair.

It was more about giving Fencehouses, Great Lumley and Houghton (away from the X1 corridor) direct links to Newcastle more than anything and it was just a place to terminate as the interchanging doesn't really work right now and there'd probably be some demand there (let's be real no-one is changing to an hourly service). 

Might help make the 71 sustainable long term and there's a lot of new house building around the Fencehouses area which deserve more than a pointless hourly midibus service to nowhere really. 

You could make the case for extending the 79 through to Seaham though and terminating the 21 extension short either really though, if you didn't want it too long as the cross Houghton demand is probably quite limited really.