Where the axe will fall...

This with a bowler tip to Sir Herbert Beeching...

Eye's readers may be interested in the following savings agreed by my colleagues...

• A £309m reduction in the Department's specific grants to local authorities

• The Secretary of State is consulting the Mayor on a proposed £108m reduction in the Department’s grant to TfL, the same percentage reduction proposed across local government.

• Network Rail will reduce spend by £100m

• The Department is also making £112m savings in its direct expenditure.

• The Department will not be going forward in 2010-11 with planned spend on the HLOS rolling stock schemes that have not already been contractualised.

Wither IEP, Tram-Train and new fleets for London Midland & Thameslink?

Farewell Messrs Hall and Green, Stationers to the late Lord DafT Vader, and their Better Stations Programme?

Who knows?

One piece of good news.

Happily my First Division colleagues have confirmed that the entire £683m saving will no longer be achieved by simply cancelling Stuart Baker...

The Age of Austerity beckons

This from the BBC's Nick Robinson...

The American economist David Hale says that the governor of the Bank of England has told him that the next British government will need to launch an austerity drive so tough that it will threaten its political survival, potentially leaving that party out of power for a generation.

Farewell electrification, Crossrail, a new Thameslink fleet, add your own pet project here, etc...

By their stats shall you know them

Telegrammed by Ithuriel
According to the Executive Summary of Planning Ahead - the industry's plan for 2014 and beyond:

The rail industry is a success. There are even more passengers than in 1946, on a network half the size, and these passengers are increasingly satisfied with their travel experience.

Rail freight has grown by more than 60 per cent since 1995.

But as Roger Ford points out in the May Informed Sources having grown back to the tonne kilometres generated in 1989, non-coal freight has been on a plateau since the turn of the century.

And if freight hasn't grown in seven years of unprecedented economic stability when will it?

Sinking ships?

An extra-ordinary puff piece on Richard Bowker in tonight's Evening Standard.

Chris Blackhurst begins:

"There are some people I'd fancy my chances at poker with. Richard Bowker isn't one of them. The boss of National Express is in the midst of a crisis but he doesn't show it."

And so it continues, interminably, until the final icky making paragraph:

Hard to imagine now, but on the day National Express won the franchise, his wife was giving birth to their second child. They were so thrilled that they discussed calling him Waverley, after the Edinburgh station. Young Charlie Bowker at least can give thanks that better sense prevailed.

Nice of Bowker to drag his own family into the media spotlight. Of course we should be grateful for small mercies. Bowker, a friend of the Blairs, managed to avoid emulating Cherie and going for a full 'Balmoral disclosure'.

No matter.

So why did Bowker decide to bare his soul to the relaunched, good news, London Evening Standard.

Obviously any connection with the current search for a London Underground managing director is entirely co-incidental.

UPDATE: This just in from Charles Yerkes...

Interesting. Applications for the MD's role have to be in by the 22nd of this month.

And of course Bowker started his railway career at the Underground.