Time to dust this thread off, good stuff on pages 1,2 & 3 drifts a bit after that. But will passenger services Ely, Soham, Newmarket to Cambridge and return and other more frequent services needed for East West Rail and general demand growth mean this line will be upgraded in the next 10 years? Whatever happened to the proposed Mildenhall development and the rail link into it?
Let's suppose, with some investment, capacity is added on the single line to enable 2tph rather than 1tph.
What's the best use of an extra tph?
-Making Ipswich half hourly probably satisfies the most demand (e.g. from Bury St Edmunds) and probably wins the Business Case test
-Going to Ely via Soham probably gives the best 'social' benefit in giving Soham a direct Cambridge link and boosting housing there. But probably needs the single line Soham-Ely to be sorted too to avoid hitting freight capacity
-Reopening to somewhere like Mildenhall has by far the highest infrastructure spens for (probably) lower overall benefits
The rhetorical question to all this is "With finite capacity, what is the railway *for*?"