Scratching a living on the lifeline links of rural Northumberland

摘要

The A696 is the trunk road north-westwards from Newcastle. Beyond the city's airport and the small commuter town of Ponteland, it reaches deeply rural Northumberland with scattered hamlets and small villages, and a short distance past Otterburn it fuses into the cross-border A68 over more moorland and hills towards Jedburgh and Edinburgh. Although United Auto and what latterly was Eastern Scottish ran long distance stage carriage services along it until the early 1980s and National Express remained on it until 2016, this primarily was the territory of independent operators running coaches and small buses on infrequent schedules to provide lifeline connections for the communities on or close to the A696. David Holding has based this publication for the Omnibus Society's Provincial Historical Research Group on the detailed work by the late Chris Warn, a teacher and enthusiast who studied the development of bus services in Northumberland from 1905 to 1975.