But why would a service that is running to capacity most nights be cancelled? There is clearly a need to run the service, weather or not it actually makes a profit
Why are daytime services being used by far higher numbers of people being cut? Lack of cash in the overall rail expenditure pot.
If you’ve not had a look at the ScotRail timetable consultation, it’s probably worth doing so. Here’s the document that lists the average subsidy per journey for daytime services in 2019/20
https://www.scotrail.co.uk/sites/de...rail_route_by_route_key_metric_assessment.pdf
Routes around Glasgow where the subsidy per journey is of the order of £2-3 are having severe frequency cuts, fast trains removed and many evening services reduced to 1TPH (some inner suburban stations are having their daytime frequency cut to 1TPH). Even Edinburgh to Aberdeen which loses 23 pence per journey and the normally profitable E&G route are being cut to save money.
I strongly suspect that if you ran a survey of rail users in Scotland on whether the public would prefer the sleeper to be retained or daytime services restored to something close to 2019 levels, the result would probably be overwhelming. I don’t want the sleeper cut either, but it’s very much a niche service used by a minuscule fraction of the people that use daytime trains.
However, if the majority of people using it are tourists then the overall economic contribution might well be positive.
If this sort of analysis hasn’t been done then it definitely needs to be: it’s the one thing (other than Scottish MPs using the service…) that could heavily tip the balance in favour of retention.