Off the field operations

I live in a village. When Go North East has issues with broken down buses or staff absences etc., the bus from ours to Chester le Street is one of the first to be cancelled. It cuts people off and hinders them going to work, school, shopping, medical appointments and so on.

We had bother during the last academic year as they kept cancelling the bus at short notice, so I had to keep driving my daughter and her friend down to Chester le Street or picking them up on an afternoon so they could attend school. The bus from Chester to Durham was a bit more reliable but still had some delays and cancellations. During her A-Level exams, either me or another Mam drove them all the way to school as they were terrified of being delayed and being late for their exams.

 

You're 100% right about the local railway mate. The number of times a Metro breaks down between Pelaw and Sunderland, putting delays on other journeys is very bad. Their is also no scope to add additional running lines so the problem will always remain, and knowing Network Rail, they wouldn't spend the money anyway.

And the problem with Northern is the fact the NE gets given the oldest traction of the fleet and gets told to get on with it while the newer fleet goes to Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester etc. Yet Newcastle is the best performing station in the network, thanks in no small part to Heaton who work wonders to keep the 156's and 158's running. However, due to the age of the rolling stock problems will always arise and delays and cancellations are inevitable.

Their is a tender in for new MMU trains but no one has been awarded that yet and these are supposedly being allocated to Newcastle. Again though, probably the pessimist in me, believes they will end up down south and the older units pushed up North!

 

As a bloke who worked on it at the time said to me years ago, they brought the metro through to Sunderland on the cheapest way they could using existing lines, instead of the more logical route via Washington and north Sunderland into the city centre. Anyone could see there's be problems at times but rather than pay for more tracks or sidings they went ahead with the cheap option. You could do more tracks, but it meant raisings costs as you'd have to widen cuttings, which might mean buying up housing or paying massive compensation to people, not to mention more engineering for retaining walls etc before you get to laying tracks. The bloke said to me at the time it was coming through that all that's happened is the line between Sunderland and Newcastle has been tarted up a bit with some new stations added and that within 20 years people would criticise it and want more heavy rail services. He's been proved right in my opinion.

What you need are people to look at other areas, how they do it, take the best ideas from them and look at the big picture and see how you can integrate it all fully. It might mean some original or blue sky thinking or adapting things that might be a bit unusual or controversial at first. My worry is that it'll end up being either a piecemeal approach of "we'll do this bit first then later this bit then after that this other bit" but later never comes or it'll end up being focussed on one area above others, the typical Newcastle centric approach we've had for the last 50 odd years and everyone else getting crumbs off the table.