I think @JasonB means that the world has changed in the past 40 years. Progression in some areas and regression in some areas.
This particular thread is about progress. Almost nobody cares about catering on the trains, people just want to get around quickly.
Wages and prices are in an ever-increasing spiral, and in order to keep up, everything else needs to be stripped back.
If we go back forty years, to the days of catering on trains, Ireland was broke, nobody had anything, nobody could afford anything, the trains were lovely to look at but crap to travel on, it was a different world.
Adding things like catering back in would literally be throwing money away for nothing.