WW, Yes East Mids Airport is a very near neighbour!
I'm not surprised about the electrification.
NR usually fail to issue a scope of requirement and tells industry that they are the experts so tell us what you are going to do, stating all your assumptions.
They require a budgetary price to get authorisation for the spend.
Because there is no proper scope, the budgetary priced offered up by different contractors will differ markedly as each has a different understanding of what is required.
NR picks the cheapest budgetary price and issues an ITT. Again, there will be a lot of documents but no defined scope. Industry tries to navigate its way through and prices against an assumed scope but invariably this scope is wrong and requires lots of re-work causing delays and increased cost. Sometimes new documents are issued that change the interpretation of the scope late in the day, or even after a bid has been submitted.
If a contract is awarded there will then be a period where the scope is defined again in order to complete outline designs; and industry has to re-price. During project delivery there will be numerous variation orders as the scope is refined. and on it goes.
NR is supposed to have a planned maintenance and upgrade programme but does not have the people who appear to know what the detail of that requires. And their planned programme always seems to come as a surprise to them with stupid deadlines and unrealistic expectations.
They have framework contractors who are supposed to deliver against the scopes but the scopes are poor. When the contractors issue designs for authorisation, NR hands them over the a design consultancy like Atkins or Jacobs to do the review and this all takes time and money and results in different understanding of the scope, so the Scope changes and the design has to change etc etc etc.
And then the contractors probably dont have enough of the trained resources and project managers to deliver etc etc
You could not make it up. It would be cheaper to rip up the railways and concrete over the Permanent Way for the exclusive use of Coaches and HGV.