It surprised me that there was no mention of using Northern between Newcastle Central and Heworth, which would have been more convenient than the bus for many passengers. Being how there is inter-availability of tickets anyway, it wouldn't need any 'special arrangements'. Plus, when they realised that the problem would persist until the end of service, they could have tried to see if Northern were able to run any extras during the evening peak and later into the evening. (OK they might not have any units or drivers spare, but it may have been possible to call some drivers in on overtime.)
My real bugbear (and it also happens during planned engineering work) is that the platform indicators still show 'South Shields' and 'South Hylton', even though all the trains are terminating at Monument. I was at Regent Centre this evening and there were some confused people who weren't sure if the line had re-opened or not, as the PIS said the next train was for 'South Hylton'.
I mentioned the trains on the Facebook page, Metro never seem to be keen on advertising it. My big problem is Northern seemed to place 156s on the services normally operated by 142s. At Heworth people could have got the train instead of waiting the 45 minutes till the next South Hylton train! Nexus/Metro always fail in advertising that this service actually exists and people can use it. Northern may not have been able to run extra services, but I'm sure they may have been able to double up some units to 4 car trains with the rear two cars splitting at Sunderland and going back to Newcastle.
The PIS was going of what trains were saying. I went into Monument and the train said South Shields, I asked a Police Officer if the line was open and he said 'No, this train is going to The Coast. Why do you ask?' I told him it said South Shields on both the boards and on the front of the train and he laughed and said 'Well, this is Metro. What do you expect'. He then directed me to the replacement bus!
As for Hew, I never saw him at around 5:30pm. Was he hiding from the public and only came out to give a quick a interview? Wouldn't surprise me with what's been going on lately with all these delays, something really needs to be done. Yes I understand there are faults that can't be helped due to the weather etc. but like someone on the Facebook page said 'Why can't you have someone who will go along to the sections that are common failure areas and just get them to do a quick inspection.' I have to say it's a good point and would have prevented quite a few failures lately if just a quick track walk took place between trains. The impact of these delays is what's worst. Metros contingency plans seem to be non-existent. Today, it took them about two hours for replacement buses to begin operating, even then there was only four for a good while. Go North East pushed out a few extra 27s and had them running in pairs but that soon went up because of the loadings being too high.
Staff being deployed at stations was terrible, when I got to Jarrow about 30 minutes after the start of this mess there were no staff and the PIS just said 'No Metro service' since I'd checked before leaving I already knew but other people wouldn't of done and there were at least 5 people just waiting on the platform in the hope a train would show. This is where I think my idea of having staff deployed to set areas would be useful, for example The coast-St James, The Coast-Monument (via South Gosforth), Airport-Monument, Monument-Pelaw,Pelaw-South Hylton, Pelaw-South Shields, then in the peaks extra staff South Gosforth-Pelaw.
In this hot weather on buses with no air con and people sweating like mad because of the heat Metro should have had bottles of water being handed out to those in the queue at the bus stops. Surely Monument should have a store of water when the weather get's hot. Yes it may cost but the benefits will be huge.
If anyone can come out of this mess victorious though it's Go North East, they showed they were willing to push out extra buses from the depot and did everything in their power to keep people moving where Metro failed.
P.S You may have noticed the thread's title changed.