One thing that is worth noting is that until the end of October of TOC's were to reduce the need for staff time then the Treasury would have been funding a significant amount of their wages bill anyway through the furlough scheme. As such the extra cost of paying them to run trains which people use probably wasn't all that much more.
Whilst I agree that there's likely to be some savings by cutting services, the problem is that often they serve different places. As the faster the service the further it's likely to go.
As an example you could cut some services between Basingstoke and Waterloo because those from Basingstoke can use the Basingstoke stoppers. The problem is that they then means that you're cutting services which serve Weymouth, Southampton, Portsmouth, Salisbury, Exeter, etc.
Even if you moved those longer distance services to then run the Basingstoke stoppers (even if you could without a significant wait at Basingstoke) then that's unlikely to save you much more than energy costs.
Yes you could save some overtime, but in the greater scheme of things not a lot.
Across the network (where there's more than 4tph along any given line) there's probably a similar story for a lot of services. That's not to say that there's some duplication of services which could be streamlined a bit, however I suspect they are likely to be the exception.
However again there's two parts to this debate:
- what's happening now
- what's likely to happen once things return more to normal
What's happening now is that 35-40% of tickets are being sold compared with 2019. Yes that's a big drop, but it's likely to be sorry lived once restrictions start to be removed again. Yes it's costing a lot to run, but there's not a lot which can be done in the short term to fix this.
Longer term is much more likely that we'd get back to circa 2010 (or better) levels of use across the network fairly quickly. That's likely to hide variations across different areas.
For instance short distance travel is likely to recover quickly (the cost saving from WFH when your season ticket is £500/year isn't going to be that attractive, likewise those traveling for secondary school or college are likely to return to near normal levels fairly quicker).
Longer distance travel (the sort where you're visiting people socially rather than for work) is also likely to recover quickly. With the ability to work anywhere there's a broadband connection may actually allow people to go away more during the school holidays.
As an example a family go and visit a set of the children's grandparents, the adults WFH 2 days over the week that they are there and go for days out the rest of the time. They have a near normal 9 days away, but the parents have each only used 3 day's worth of leave. With flexible working (i.e. long days and a bit of evening working you might even be able to reduce that further).
That means that you could be away for the whole of the summer holidays and use 18 days of leave. You might, by WFH 3 days a week, manage to do that for every school holiday that there is.
However there could be some time during that time away when one or other might need to be in the office. If that's the case then chances are it's likely that is not overly practical to have two cars wherever you are (not least just the ability to park that many cars), and so coming back for that work could be done by train. Especially given that you could work on the train and so your travel time is still (mostly) counting as work rather than lost time.
A single 150 mile each way trip would be the same in miles as a week of 30 mile each way commuting (it's likely that it could be the same in revenue as well, however chances are more than just those who commute by train would do so).
Where there's likely to be losses is where there's people traveling 30+ miles into Central London, however that's likely to just mean the removal of some of the extra peak hour services required, but probably not all that many.
As whilst a fall of 60% on such lines might be entirely possible many of those services are running 110%+ full, so cut from 4tph to 3tph and reduce train lengths to 8 vs 12 and you'll cut capacity by 50%. That would result in train loadings of 88%, which would still be rather busy. As such the end of 12 coach peak hour services into London isn't something that's likely to disappear entirely, especially given that there being enough seats for all may well attract a few more people to use rail services.
However over the whole day is unlikely that a 60% fall would be maintained, and so off peak services into London would probably be maintained (maybe with some shortening of services, but probably not all that many).
However, and this is a key point which is often overlooked, if London commuting is being hit that hard there's likely to be a lot of other rail services which are little or no falls to maintain a 10-30% fall overall (which is a likely range for overall fall in rail use in the first full year post Covid-19).
Assuming that's the case, then those places with up to 2tph are likely to fairly safe from cuts in services (unless they form part of into Central London traffic, in which case they could see an increase in journey times to allow for other services to be cut).
The sorts of services which could see longer journey times could be those to Weymouth (adding a stop at Basingstoke and Woking), those to Yeovil (calling at a few more key locations between Basingstoke and Waterloo), Southampton (looking more like the off peak calling pattern for the Basingstoke stoppers from Basingstoke inwards), etc.
The longer journey time would be "offset" by many by actually being able to sit and work on the train more, as even 30 minutes of such work a week would allow an extra stop to be added each way (assuming 5 day commuting).
