(18 Aug 2026, 9:52 am)Storx wrote imo the Regent Centre is too close to Newcastle to really deal with the Arriva expresses, it would be annoying having to travel say 40 minutes on a bus to there, to then have to change for 10 minutes. It has to be the opposite way round.Quite sobering to think for years that Arriva got away with "packing 'em in and running 'em late" every day until the Northumberland Line came along.
You could make an argument with proper integration half the Blyth expresses don't need to exist and the train is the 'express' though. Newsham and Bebside aren't in a bad location to do the hub instead.
You'd need a massive change in mind for that though. Similar with Cramlington if you dealt with the capacity issues on the ECML.
10 minutes late at Newsham (X10/X11), 10 minutes late at the Red Lion (X21/X22) every morning! X8 unusable North of Blyth until eventually swapped with X9 but too late!
Talking about limited stops / expresses. They took the old 44 off......again packed everyone onto 308s that were behind time by Billy Mill every morning. Then they had the cheek to take off the 11.40pm service back in 2017 (replaced by 306) despite creaming the money during the busy times, when it was clearly to get everything all back to Blyth and locked up at the same time when their trial of the late X10/X11 failed on a Friday & Saturday night.......didn't even try running it via Wideopen, Seaton Burn and Dudley as a 43E to give it a chance to make money!
Rant over, but I've got no sympathy for them about the Northumberland Line. They deserve what they got!
On the flip side, GNE had many "recession proof" services to the MetroCentre and Newcastle from similar sorts of demographic areas.......but have butchered them going on wonderful and non-logical mystery tours, yet they aren't far off the pre-October 2015 PVR with a certain company also plucking the gaps on Saturdays and school holidays.