Our new ticketing site is now live! Using either this or the original site (both powered by TrainSplit) helps support the running of the forum with every ticket purchase! Find out more and ask any questions/give us feedback in this thread!
As a Leeds Plusbus is valid throughout West Yorkshire I was wondering what the extent the Newcastle or Durham boundaries were (the awful plusbus map is not always correct) and whether this would include Beamish Museum.
Although the train service is less frequent, bus-wise the easiest station to travel to/from is Chester-le-Street. There's a summer weekend bus service from Durham most years, but nothing on it has been announced yet for 2016.
The PlusBus will take you as far as the Team Valley Sainsbury's or Eighton Banks, depending on which bus you take, and a single/return/day ticket from there would give you the 25% discount. I would expect the fare from Newcastle to, in reality, be roughly the same as from Team Valley/Eighton Banks, so don't bother with the PlusBus unless you're travelling elsewhere in Newcastle on non-Go buses later in the day.
cuccir: IME they take a flexible view of a Go ticket as "any ticket that can be used on a Go bus". I've been able to get the discount with an Explorer before.
From memory there's a pretty decent bus service from both Durham and Newcastle to the museum entrance, but it isn't within any PlusBus zone. I don't think anything much has changed since I last looked at the buses in the north east, but I can't be absolutely sure.
It might have done once upon a time, some of the Durham-Chester buses took some very random routes before Go streamlined everything about ten years ago, but not in recent years.
I think it's more likely that I got it wrong. I did look into going to the museum once and I was undecided whether to stay in Durham or Newcastle. In the end I didn't go at all, but that's probably why I was thinking of a bus from both Durham and Newcastle!