(10 hours ago)Storx wrote That must leave Coundon as one of the largest places in the country, never mind North East, with no evening service now. 

So well for improving public transport. Mind they'd be better off having the 8 and 56 running all the time instead of the bizarre 35A. It's the sort of routes which should've been funded by BSIP imo.

Assuming no alternative backfill that we don't know about yet (perhaps evening 56 extensions?):
- Loss of 104 means Newfield won't have any buses; it's only a quite small community, but there are very few such places in County Durham with literally no regular bus service. 
- Loss of 35A means also without evening services are Chilton Lane, Kirk Merrington and the Dean Bank area of Ferryhill, and there will be no evening service linking Ferryhill and Spennymoor. 35A was an odd route, but it was giving at least a limited evening service to these various communities. In pre-Covid years it ran hourly for the full evening, and did have fair use. Wasn't it still meant to be hourly when the contract was awarded to Hodgson in succession to Scarlet Band, but a combination of driver shortage plus anti-social behaviour (stone-throwing etc) meaning the service dropped from a 2 bus to a 1 bus operation on a token two-hourly timetable? 

But in the end, perhaps the truth is that for whatever reason the demand for such services has withered away - pubs and clubs closing, Bishop Auckland not being the place it once was, etc - so regrettably money in subsidy budgets doesn't stretch that far any longer? I fear there are other cases in the region where that will be coming into question.

Regarding BSIP: it seems not to be generally appreciated that throughout the region, a significant part of the BSIP and successor funding  had to be allocated to cover the increasing subsidy required to maintain existing services in the face of reduced passengers, including picking up services that previously had been operated without subsidy. Effectively, as part of that, 35A and 104 were being kept afloat with BSIP. Hopefully some backfill may yet emerge, but perhaps a weekday daytime link between Sedgefield and Newton Aycliffe is actually a more important alternative use of the money.