(28 Mar 2014, 3:33 pm)robisdave wrote It's fact that Stagecoach do not appear to do much in the way of wholesale service changes, from my experience, sadly limited unfortunately, they do seem to attempt to maintain what is the essence of a service, namely continuity and reliability, as such taking action where individual and specific issues arise. The last one such that I read about was regarding the works at Newport and how these would affect services operating across that corridor? That idea seems to make sense rather than continually swoping and changing things; if there is a clear and identifiable problem on a particular service/route such as late running or overloading then deal accirdingly. It seems sensible as the relative information can, as far as I'm aware, be sourced directly from both the drivers and ticket machines.

Have to say they don't often change things but they do tend to tweak things to help with reliability, but they rarely use extra resources to do this so it never tends to solve much.

The use of the Tridents and interworking 36/38 to deal with Newport Road and Stockton delays is a good idea of what they do well. When services are changed to help with reliability its never more than a few minutes either way though, and I know from experience that there are services which run late every day that never get looked at. Some of it is delays you can't really deal with though (I should know, been driving 7s today in Yarm.....!!)

I remember one memorable night when I picked up a 36 in Stockton 25 mins late and was still 25 late at Park End but then was on time by the time I'd gone all the way to Hartlepool, with the early evening extra running time (and partially slack timings beyond Billingham) dealing with the delay.

There's a fine line between running a realistic timetable and running a clockface timetable though, you can't make things too confusing for your customers, even if that's how realistically the service does run. Nobody would remember a timetable that had services at say 0958, 1013, 1027, 1048, 1102, 1121, 1134, 1152 etc whereas every 15 mins is easier to remember, even if the service isn't actually that reliable. I think I mentioned the other day there is some delays you can't timetable for, like school loading issues and things like that, as they don't happen every day.

You also wouldn't believe how much tactical 'games' go on between drivers too! I know I've been part of them too many times.