Yes, isn't it rather suspicious that in a country with a very large rail network, the last three reopenings of local regional railway lines St Ives, Dunstable and Leigh, all just happen to have been guided busways, rather than railway lines.
It's all quite a coincidence that all of these disparate places seem to have been suited to a guided busway, rather than a train service, unlike everywhere else
I guess, if you ignore the various heavy rail re-openings, brand new bits of heavy railway, routes converted to light rail, brand new light rail alignments (and all of the electrification, flyovers, re-doubling etc etc) then the
only things built in the last decade have been guided busways, yes.
But you're not interested in focussing resources on the projects with the best business cases, you're not bothered about using finite resources to focus on where most needed... you just want some more rural railway lines - you've made up your mind on what you want the answer to be in advance so there's no point in trying to discuss the merits of some of the things that we are spending money on because you only care about certain schemes.
For example, the Ordsal Chord was partly built to free up three paths into Manchester Piccadilly each hour (from the Stockport direction), benefitting hundreds of passengers per hour. That's big league stuff. You're interested in opening village stations that may not get a hundred passengers a day. Whole different ball game.
How many people travel from Whitechapel to Dalston each day (compared to the number who'd travel from Okehampton to Tavistock)?
I'd rather we focus attention on how best tot use resources, which might mean that improving an existing line can deliver a hundred extra passengers a day better than building a new line (to attract a similar number of people to the network).
Heavy rail is suited to long term big projects shifting large volumes of passengers. For smaller scale things, there's light rail, there's guided busways... and for little villages there's Dial-A-Ride minibuses.