Not really off topic because it plays into how many trains are available to the industry and therefore get deployed.
Even in BR days, you still had to pay interest to the Treasury for finance, nothing was free. And in those days paying the Treasury rate was often more expensive than going directly to the market, which you were not allowed to do. With the assets off the Government books, going the ROSCO route has enabled a huge amount of new rolling stock to be ordered without having to go through all the usual Treasury hoops.
In BR days you still had to fund the overhauls and heavy repairs, which were the real cost in maintaining rolling stock. So smoothing that out is a great boon for both Government and the TOCs when it comes to managing your cash flow. As someone who used to do all this for a living on BR, I am really glad I don’t have the headache of funding the current class 800 and 802 repairs. Even if I thought I could get the money back from Hitachi in the future, it would blow a big hole in my finances in the interim.
Monday wasn’t good for formations on GWR because of the displacement after the events of the last few days but there are normally more 5 car workings on the GWML than hitherto because of the need to replace HST sets with IET sets but, in normal circumstances, there shouldn’t be too many on the South Wales route.