Yes I agree that things are going backwards and GNE are becoming negative. Branding seems to being, partly at least, phased out and I always find it amazing that they find it so hard to get correctly branded vehicles on the right routes. It shouldn't be too hard to get this right, with just the occasional red Northern bus as a spare. Apart from this, branding is great and makes GNE stand out among the other companies and passengers definitely identify with it and many refer to their bus by its brand name and not its number. And the Whey-Aye 5-0 is the best and most inventive of the lot. The OK idea was great too, which is why I want to see it transferred to the X21. I think its also negative that the Open Line seems to have gone, but also that the on-line surveys have been replaced by invisible local ones - I had to hunt round and round for a North Sunderland one, as I use X3 quite regularly - at least they took some notice and half-heartedly kept the X3 at least once an hour to Newcastle - perhaps because me and the person I visit there were the only ones to find and return a survey form. As I've also said before, GNE need to look at their routes as a network and stop these far-too-frequent changes, often resulting in "bitty" services which together give a far less useful journey opportunities; I often think they want to kill off routes gradually, hence changes to the X3 and 99, or say they're providing for peoples' requests for new services by just hourly routes like X36 and 27X (why not X27) so they can say they've tried but they've not worked. I'm totally against the Nexus idea for Quality Contracts, but feel that with their far too frequent changes (usually cuts in disguise), GNE are making these more likely.