(09 Jan 2015, 7:10 pm)aureolin wrote The journey would only be a few minutes difference at best. Your proposed services would suffer from their own reliability issues, if it was anything more than that. Is reliability really that poor? With them being Sapphire services, I can't see it being the case for very long, as Sapphire offers a money back guarantee. 

Normal passengers aren't going to be too fussed about vehicle, as long as it looks smart and presentable, and feels comfortable, which the Sapphire services do. Again, they're not going to care about the lack of a two way radio, as they most likely won't know.

You mention limited connections south and west of Newcastle, but wouldn't GNE passengers suffer the same fate in Bedlington and Ashington?

Yeah reliability is very poor on the X21/X22.
They are always running in twos, and once I even had a 25 minute wait for one at Haymarket. It isn't really acceptable, as it happens all of the time. 
Although I can't see GNE introducing a service from Newcastle to Ashington.