'Britain Runs on Rail' £50b investment in UK rail

If this is true, it seems odd that this is allowed when a bus company cannot use profits from a successful route to subsidise other unprofitable services.

There is absolutely no new money. This is a response to persistent criticism from some quarters about the rail industry not "fighting its corner" and also to try to fend off the nationalisation campaign. No one should be overly surprised to see a "distraction" campaign hot on the heels of a very poor funding decision from Government. In "another place" someone recently dissected the funding announcement for Network Rail which showed that the "billions and billions of pounds" announcement represented a significant cut in monies for maintenance and replacement works on the national network. We have no idea what's available for actual enhancement spending because the DfT has removed that and will only approve spending project by project in a yet to be made public process. If you throw in the impacts from delays in control period 5, the rollover of work into control period 6 and financing issues on NR debt then the picture is very bad indeed.

I am afraid I don't get all this "private investment" baloney. The TOCs are not charities and are not buying new trains as a favour. They're doing it because they signed a contract with the DfT to do so in the expectation that they can rack up fares in the future to fund all this expense and chuck the govt a large premium payment every year and still earn a profit. Some of the risk is borne by the rolling stock companies but I expect the environment there to change if they find they are left with fleets of unusable trains in the near future. It might be cheap to build new trains at the moment but there are no guarantees over future leasing costs. If any of the companies get their sums wrong and collapse then the only people who come to the rescue are taxpayers via the government who can't have a situation where train services do not run. Therefore all the risks are capped or set off and the taxpayer is always the financial safety net. I bet the Rail Delivery Group aren't saying that.