Dozens of rail schemes designed to relieve overcrowding may be scrapped or delayed indefinitely because of a £1.5 billion funding gap in the Government’s railway expansion programme (link below.)
http://www.rmtbristol.org.uk/2007/12/cash_to_ease_rail_crowding_is.html#more

Ministers promised in July to increase rail capacity by more than a fifth by 2014 and improve punctuality to 93 per cent of trains arriving on time. But The Times has learnt that the Department for Transport has cut the public subsidy for the railways so severely that there is not enough money to pay for the promised improvements , even assuming big efficiency gains by the industry.

Key schemes , such as lengthening trains on the most overcrowded routes, removing bottlenecks on the tracks and expanding stations , may have to be abandoned.

The rail regulator will write to the DfT on Thursday urging it to consider which schemes it is prepared to sacrifice if the funding gap is confirmed.

A Network Rail source said that the DfT could choose to delay the purchase of extra carriages. The DfT may also be forced to reduce the punctuality target , which Network Rail estimates would cost an extra £400 million to meet on top of the work already planned to reduce signal failures , broken rails and other causes of delay. Both the regulator and Network Rail believe that the Treasury is unlikely to agree to bridge the gap by allocating extra funding to the railways.

Tom Harris , the Rail Minister , said that the Government still believed that its forecasts were accurate and was confident that its expansion plans could be implemented with the budget that it had already allocated.

He said: “We are a long way away from asking for more money or cutting projects.”