This issue led to a gap in excess of 4 hours between stopping Northbound services at Chester-le-Street on Saturday, and TPE's failure to provide any sort of replacement service, simply telling people instead to wait for the 13:02, considering the 4 hour wait for that from the first of the cancelled services (the 09:02) it was completely unacceptable. This is frankly ridiculous. A shortage of taxi drivers in Liverpool should not be leading to the effective removal of the local rail service 150 miles away in the North East.
Given the choice of empty stock working from Edge Hill that did run on Saturday (5S07), that would suggest they prioritised keeping the glorified empty stock working North of Newcastle running over providing a service to a station where they are the sole daytime service provider (Chester-le-Street), which whilst I can see that's operationally convenient it certainly doesn't benefit the customers. TPE could at the very least have put a special stop order on that service for Chester-le-Street, but they didn't.
I fail to see why 185s fresh off Ardwick couldn't have been used to start the affected northbound services from Manchester, with the two southbound services affected terminating in Manchester to get the 185s back to Ardwick. It would have contained the disruption to fewer passengers, and whilst I know that 185s can't keep to the 802 paths north of York, there is a sufficient enough gap behind the TPE services in both directions that a 185 losing 5 minutes between York and Newcastle is not the end of the world and won't hold up anything else.