Yes, my point exactly. The railways need to up their game massively if we're going to be serious about reducing car/road use. Just because London has good public transport and night-time services doesn't mean it's remotely feasible for people living in the regions in smaller cities, towns, etc. Something is seriously wrong when the railways don't start early enough in the morning for people living along, say, the Carnforth to Barrow line, to be able to get to Manchester Airport in time for the peak morning flight period. When this is mentioned, the railway insiders just spout the usual "go the night before" or "drive" - they are blind to the inherent problems of a railway network that is run more for the benefit of the staff than for the paying customer.
Even London isn't that great, being consistently 20 years behind meeting capacity needs since the late 1980s, and only catching up briefly because of dispersal. It beats the 30+ years behind for most of the rest of the country, though most of the third-tier cities have enough road capacity they can muddle along until someone can un-wreck provincial bus networks, at the cost of having traffic approaching as bad as London's or Birmingham's.
Until we can get politicians to adopt Predict and Provide for public transport the way they try to do now for roads, asset sweating is going to be the norm and there's little hope of providing for these kind of irregular flows, or all sorts of environmentally and socially desirable services (especially freight). The best that could be managed is XC putting HSTs or long voyager formations on potentially busy services, but diagramming is much tighter today than even 20 years ago and there's more difficulty with route/traction knowledge.
Still, there is some hope for home crowds, if the extra transport powers for cities with devolved powers and elected mayors (a rant for another time and place) turn out as useful as Andy Burnham hopes. I would like to see them given powers like the Adelaide Metro had which required them to run enough free services for attendees to prevent large events causing traffic or drunk driving problems, but empowered them to bill the event organiser for the extra subsidy required.
as for Merrymakers, they were good and cheap (loss making for BR), but they were fun, no good for getting anywhere at a specific time, as they were routed the 'pretty way' normally, and took hours !
EWS and Hertfordshire Railtours kept running services under the Merrymaker brand after privatisation, with assorted Mk1s and whatever locos were convenient, though I can't remember how prices compared to when BR ran them. I presume with the right accounting they were profitable (especially with Mk1s available on the cheap and with low VTAC), but the cost of PRM modifications, RTTs, and all the other deferred works that will be triggered by the modifications will probably put a big dent in the supply of ex-XC and ex-Anglia Mk2s that would be natural stock for such cheap services today.
Unfortunately, for now the only spare compliant LHCS is some Mk4s, what can be scraped up out of the stored 373s, or dragged de-motored EMUs. Any of those options would require loco modifications or some kind of translator, which makes it a non-starter as it is probably not much cheaper than making a Mk3 compliant.
Regarding their profitability in BR days, I was under the impression that IC's rail tours and charter trains were charged at the marginal cost of operation, but the fixed costs were either lost in general overheads or considered to be part of their insurance against embarrassment that having the spare equipment provided, plus unofficially they provided fodder for future treasury-imposed stock reduction campaigns like the rule that 3 Mk1s had to be scrapped for every 2 Mk3s introduced.