The key messages regarding transport, namely "essential travel only" and "private good, public bad", will have to continue for much of 2021. It will take years to reverse this trend as these messages will have become ingrained. A return to public transport use is only likely to occur where there are incentives to use it, namely for long distance inter-city journeys and in urban areas where there is road congestion. Therefore, in addition to cutting excess peak frequencies, cuts should be focussed on lightly used branch lines and secondary routes in rural areas, which is why I suggested that the DfT could consider retrieving the Serpell report and reconsidering it. Cutting routes in Scotland and Wales in particular, even if unpopular, is unlikely to lose many seats for the Tories.
Wouldn't that just be plain irresponsible? The trains need to be there to support the economic recovery. Cutting secondary and tertiary routes is quite frankly a stupid idea. As has been stated already in this thread and countless others if people can't get from A to B by train they simply won't use the train as getting a car all the way is more convenient than driving it to the nearest mainline station then trying to arrange transport at the other end. Most car users from my experience will not even consider bus connections at either end a viable option (a lot of people hate traveling on buses).
If a line is mothballed it'll still need to be inspected/maintained otherwise it falls into an unusable state. So we need to be very careful with what we do to rural branch lines. Most likely we won't save any cost on train leases as they're mostly on long term contracts that would need renegotiation that won't save us any money if the rolling stock providers get their way (hint: they will)
As far as I can tell from an operational standpoint the railway is shortstaffed as it currently is so we won't be getting rid of any staff members (barring station staff) however it might go some way to reducing the reliance on overtime. The main problem I see in redeploying staff is that it'll most likely require additional training as you can't just move a driver from one route to another overnight if they don't already sign in. This will require training to be done of which costs money in the short term and means staff aren't making the company any money.
As for removing peak extras I personally don't see this saving much money either as I believe it's used by some companies to allow people to go parttime before retiring or for training. The stock is already leased for the medium term and maintenance is done at a time where the depots don't have much workload during what is considered social hours, in general this means they get better value for money out of the depot as it'll still need to be staffed to some degree during the day anyway. The extra stock helps with operational resilliancy as if a unit has to be taken out of service during the day there's stock that can be used as backup.
First and last services being cut may save some money in staffing cost however at least where I am they're generally there to position stock in the correct place for the daytime service and quite often ran in public service as the additional cost is negligible as the train is going that way anyway.
Tldr: the only saving I see being made in the short term is through less overtime
