One "good" thing is that the squeeze has come after the accessibility deadline kicked in, so at least we can sweat current assets a bit more (i.e. extend the operational life of vehicles rather than buying new ones) - if the crisis had happened a few years ago then we'd be faced with keeping knackered Pacers running for even longer, patched together with duct tape, dealing with the consequences of the angry disability lobby etc. Keeping a Sprinter on the rails for a few more years may not be ideal but it's a lot more palatable than patching a 142 together and hoping it doesn't fall apart!
We know from Scotland that the electrification costs can be vastly cheaper than those of GWML and MML, getting on to EU benchmarks.
But at the same time, EGIP and to be descoped a fair bit - I think that the "land of milk and honey" stuff gets exaggerated a bit (and I say this as a Scot) - even something relatively simple like the Paisley Canal branch seemed to be a bit of a struggle. Great news that they are electrifying lines, of course, but there have been a few problems on both sides of the border.
Has the road budget suffered a 10% cut?
There's not a "road budget" in quite the same way that there's a rail budget - but we sometimes like to pretend that roads get built quite easily whilst rail projects take a lot longer - look how long they've been trying to sort out the bottleneck around Stonehenge.
I presume that you are referring to proposed platforms 15 and 16. Not building this expensive white elephant would be a worthwhile saving. The Castlefield problem is best solved by changing its use and removing longer distance passenger services (to Chester/Lancaster/York and beyond) from it.
I agree - building more platforms at Piccadilly would only encourage the messy pattern of hourly services that strangle capacity around Manchester - you'd soon see the proposed Bradford - Manchester Airport service and various other proposed routes.
There are two tracks through Castlefield at the moment and two "through" platforms at Piccadilly/ Oxford Road. Thameslink has a similar "core" and can cope with a train every couple of minutes. But the apparent need for Cleethorpes/ Barrow/ Middlesbrough/ Glasgow etc to all have regular Airport services, and the mess created by trying to give places like Southport a Piccadilly link means that we have nine Airport trains per hour but gaps of up to seventeen minutes (and then several trains within a short period, meaning passengers will be badly distributed).
A more efficient use of capacity would mean simplifying the messy combination of services around Manchester - no need to spend tens of millions of pounds on extra platforms.
(especially if a lot of the congestion at Castlefield is caused by Airport trains, and we see that demand for flights never returns to what it once was)
we just don't know to what extent city commuting will come back, so tomorrow's pinch points may be in different places.
This is a very good point - it might take another six months to see how demand patterns settle down - e.g. if we see that long distance London demand doesn't come back to pre Covid levels then something like the flat crossing at Newark will be less of an issue than it once was.
Whilst it wouldn't make up anywhere near the 1bn shortfall, cut backs could be made to things like repainting and rebranding trains and stations as a start. These aren't important in the scheme of things.
Things need repainting - look at how bus companies regularly repaint vehicles (even if the livery doesn't change) - the money spent on this is fairly trivial.
