(03 Jan 2015, 7:29 pm)Dan wrote I honestly think that the best thing to do would be to introduce a non-stop express service Durham to Darlington via the A1, with cheaper fares than that of the competing train.
I think it's quite likely that anyone doing that journey by train at the moment will have to travel into Durham City Centre by bus, so there's a fair chance that they'll be coming in by Arriva anyway. With the current journey time of the 7 from A - B being over an hour, it should come as no surprise that a large amount of people will opt for the train if they want to do this journey. If there was an Arriva service offering the journey in approximately 30 minutes, this is only 15 minutes longer than the train, and the potential savings to customers could outweigh the advantage of saving this time by using the train.
I can't help but see that this is a missed opportunity, when we have such an over-saturated offering on the Peterlee - Sunderland corridor...
The problem at Arriva is that if they start an express service it is not long before they add extra stops and defeat the appeal of an express examples are the old X14 that Bishop Auckland Depot ran and the current Darlo X1