Indeed, the normal fare paid on annual season tickets is about the same as off-peak walk-up tickets ant they travel on trains that some times only make one or two return journeys per day. Many staff are required to operate the service for 2-3 hours per morning and evening peaks requiring complicated shift working if wasteful levels in the intervening hours are to be avoided. Unless there is sufficient patronage to fill at least some trains between the peaks, subsidies would have to rise dramatically, even above current Northern levels.
Trains being used for the peak then sitting around the rest of the day, isn't really a phenomenom up here. There isn't the stock or the staff. In this respect, Northern services are already much more effeciently run than the South.
Compare the number of GWR/GA services run by two coach trains to the number of Northern services run by two coach trains... Northern clearly has a much bigger percentage of its franchise taken up by such short services... "hiding" those services inside a franchise that also included TPE would still leave them sticking out like a sore thumb... can't hide these things, however much some people may wish to pretend that you can.
Why does it even matter what number two carriage trains GWR/GA run (although it's actually quite a lot since you ask - try standing on Norwich station for a few hours and see). If you need to run a two/three carriage rural service in the North, and you need to run a two/three carriage rural service in Anglia, what's the difference, except that one is subsidised within a franchise, whilst the other is subsidised outside of it. It doesn't make any difference to:
- The profitability/subsidy profile of either of the routes in question.
- The cost of running the railway system as a whole
- The benefits of running rural railway services.
The only thing it does make a difference to, is that one artificially drawn set of railway lines looks more profitable than another another artificially drawn set of railway lines. If Northern were split and combined with the InterCity main lines and London commuter services in the manor of the Big 4, those companies subsidy profiles would look very different.
It does seem strange that you can't seem to comprehend a railway outside of the framework of TOC's artificially created at privatisation. Perhaps its nostalgia for the early privatisation era ?
Personally, I don't think that the costs of heavy rail (two members of staff spread between thirty passengers, signalling costs, infrastructure maintained to much higher standard than light rail...) is appropriate for a number of the lines that Northern serves.
So you have an idealogical belief in a smaller railway network. Given that this is the case, it seems illogical to single out a lightly used railway in the North over a lightly used railway elsewhere, simply because of an accident of history in how the lines happenned to be bundled together in the mid 1990's.
How many Northern services are "overcrowded" (and how many of these are off-peak) and how many are carrying round so few passengers that they could be accommodated by a minibus?
My observations can only be anecdotal, however outside of my commute, most of the services I travel on are off-peak and tend to be very busy. Far too busy for a mini-bus. The only exceptions I can think of are some late evening services and the new service between Castleford and Huddersfield, which is still finding it's feet.
Some of the most crowded off-peak services I've been on (i.e. full and standing) have been Leeds - Lancaster and Middlesborough - Whitby, Calder Valley and the Hope Valley stopper. Generally busy services I've been on have included the Hallam line, the Cumbrian Coast, the Tyne Valley, the S&C, the Atherton Line, Liverpool - Manchester (via Warrington and Newton), Yorkshire Coast, Southport line (the list could go on and on).