On Saturday 12 April 2025 Parliament was recalled to pass emergency legislation intended to prevent the blast furnaces at Scunthorpe from closing. British Steel is the United Kingdom’s sole manufacturer of rail track, and before the government intervened Network Rail had built up a stockpile of rail to last approximately one year. Two months later it signed a new five-year supply contract with the same company for at least 337,000 tonnes, while turning to continental mills for the balance. The episode shows that a railway’s ability to recover from damage depends on more than the rails, switches and machines it can buy in a normal year. A line can be physically repaired and still not be usable at its previous performance; a component can be on the market and still not be approved for the configuration in place; a machine can belong to a contractor’s fleet and still be committed elsewhere or lack a trained crew. Repairing a line once is a procurement problem. Repairing it a second and a third time, after the first stock has been consumed and while other networks compete for the same suppliers, is an industrial one. The unresolved question is whether Europe’s infrastructure managers have arranged materials, plant, crews, inspection and finance so that capacity can be restored repeatedly, and whether the public record allows that capability to be measured at all.