Whilst "hardly any of the general population care about rail" is a common trope made by forum contributors who want to try and convince us of their worldly savvy, the impression I get in the media is that in this instance the forum is a lot more blasé than the representatives of the regions and cities that are concerned. Although on one level these contributors might be right - there are probably a lot of people both sides of the Pennines who do not care for trains and railways at all but are now staunch backers of the rail building programme since it became a regional identity issue.
Naturally as a rail forum we want to talk about trains and railways, and thus perhaps fail to notice how totemic the rail programme has become to the aspirations of Northern England. If the slogan "levelling up" was not an invitation to have such aspirations, I don't know what is. The truncation of the programme has thus been subsumed into a broader narrative of political sleaze and dishonesty.
This video from a Yorkshire based political commentator typifies this view.