The rail industry is in a mess. In the second that it took you to read that sentence, another £400 of taxpayer’s cash was tipped into the gaping void between what the government spends on the railway and how much passengers pay to travel by train in Britain. In the course of a year, that amounts to a £12.5bn subsidy (excluding the ballooning cost of the HS2 project).
Cutting costs has always proved difficult, not least because the rail unions are adept at extracting higher pay in return for increased productivity. Significantly thinner timetables save only a morsel of cash, because the fixed costs of the railway are astronomical. But I fear we may soon see some swingeing cuts to services in a desperate bid to reduce the deficit.
