Instead we expend vast sums of public money to allow them to avoid spending that money.
They should be required to bear the full commercial cost of all trackside train detection infrastructure, for as long as they do not adopt ECP brakes, and the full cost of all signal masts, colour light signalling equipment, TPWS equipment, AWS equipment and a bunch of other things whilst they do not have ETCS equipment installed.
If they go out of business, so be it.
Perhaps a carrot can be provided in terms of grant for fitting the required equipment, but US experience indicates the costs are not particularly high
. Supposedly costs have been estimated at only $5,600 per wagon
Even ten thousand wagons would cost on order of $60m. How big is the UK wagon fleet?
TVM in the Channel Tunnel apparently includes a 30km/h speed code.
I think the reason KVB was employed at St Pancras was predominantly that only six speeds were available because of the decision to only utilise a single route code, and given that international trains would have to have KVB anyway, there was little reason not to have it fitted at St Pancras. The Line was built essentially as if it was in France after all.
EDIT:
Found the study the $5600 USD comes from, its
here - AU$8000 per wagon, which is about ~5500USD at present exchange rates.
EDIT #2:
We're going off topic though - so I will say this:
I'm well aware that ETCS is now the only game in town, but there simply should be no more conventional resignalling projects in the pipeline at all - it should be ETCS L2 or ETCS L2/L3 Hybrid only from now on.
If the freight operators aren't prepared to operate in that environment then they should get out of the business.