But this is again my point! I'm sure the Fire Service have limited budgets, and other things to be getting on with, and so for them it makes sense to have a couple of appliances on site and wait for the flames to die down. They have no reason to rush, they aren't taking any wider hit to their finances by taking it slow and steady. It's rational behaviour for the Fire Service, and it's an economically efficient use of resources for them too.
But if you look at it from a wider picture, the railway and/or the government should be looking at it and saying this isn't just a single building fire, only affecting the occupants of the building, this is having a huge impact on tens of thousands of the members of the national workforce, what more resources can we muster to get things moving, every hour equates to a surprisingly large sum of lost revenue or lost workforce productivity.
It all feels very plodding. Each organisation just waits for a different organisation. Everything gets done in a linear sequence. There's no imaginative solutions. There's an organisational attitude of generalised helplessness, and no organisation has both the grasp of the scale and the urgency and which has the empowerment to act on it.
Crisis responses tend to be the most expensive form, and I'm certainly not getting the sense that people are slacking in trying to achieve a reopening. Given the chemistry behind the cause of the fire, I can forgive the fire brigade for erring on the side of caution.
There's another point. You are arguing that the government must do everything possible to mitigate the economic consequences of this event because of the impact on productivity. Yet that public expenditure will come through as private gain, to individuals and businesses. Given the contingency arrangements that people and companies can make, I really struggle with this panicked portrayal.
If there is a role for government in boosting its response, then it lies in what others have linked to in external reporting. Ensuring that the current level of regulation is enforced, and that the probability that one trader will cause harm to others, would do far more good than spending a very large amount on something that no one even knows is necessary.
Oh, and one other observation. I was involved in a project where a very large scaffolding was set up. The cost of the scaffolding (set up, hire, and take down) was ~£450k, and it took 6 weeks to put up, and a similar time to dismount. That was with a wall to build it against. I'm sure it could be hurried (the project was very definitely cost constrained), but the loss of a few days at this stage is frankly irrelevant in the wider scheme of things.
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