(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?

There's also another factor - at this present time there's only 1 Sapphire service that has competition ans that's North West's 575 service which has competition from First Manchester at the Bolton end of the route with their own 575 service. Funny enough, the Sapphire 575 is doing better than the 'Zivvy Rider' branded First service (which is basically their Olympia livery with a Gold relief in place of the purple).