This past year has heralded much unexpectedly good news for the rail industry.

Projects which looked hugely under-threat because of the public finances have won reprieves, others which seemed certain for the axe have, at worst, been scaled back, and the biggest of all, Crossrail and HS2, are sitting pretty.

Yesterday’s two big announcements were both examples of shrunk but still very positive schemes. The first, electrification of the Great Western, may not be extended to Swansea, but who would have been confident the Government would fund the project as far as Bristol, Cardiff and potentially the Valleys when it delayed the announcement last summer?

Similarly, the deal for new trains from Hitachi’s Agility consortium looked in peril, but has survived – albeit at £4.5bn instead of nearly £8bn, and with fewer than half of the original 1,400 carriages previously planned.

Capital infrastructure projects have survived relatively well across government – it is annual budgets on which it has focused the majority of its cost-cutting. But this is not a universal rule – the Government could perhaps have raided the rail infrastructure budget to make up some of the shortfall in the Building Schools for the Future programme, for example.

Many across the transport sector were glum when Philip Hammond was appointed Transport Secretary. This was the man destined to wield George Osborne’s axe at the Treasury, until the Coalition negotiations gave us Lib Dems in that role instead, David Laws then Danny Alexander. He seemed an ideological cost-cutter who would arrive at the DfT and get chopping. Hammond has certainly confounded the worst of those fears.