I'm guessing this is probably the usual fight between media trying to overexaggerate stories like this, and PR departments trying to downplay them into nothingn

I'm guessing this is probably the usual fight between media trying to overexaggerate stories like this, and PR departments trying to downplay them into nothingness. GWR's PR might be expecting some a newspaper to release a inflammatory story like "Foreign built trains are so dangerous that they will explode if the hit a bumblebee", and so they will try and put out preemptory statements trying to guide perception and downplay the severity of the situation. And the media will be expecting GWR's PR to be putting out equally disingenuous releases like "we redefined the metric system for the purposes of measuring cracks and now all the cracks are within acceptable tolerances", so they'll be trying to guide perception to make it as hard as possible for GWR to do that. Maybe I'm too cynical but but given that this is a fairly new story, I'd assume that GWR's statements would be entirely doublespeak as you say, and media fearmongering to be entirely speculation. There hasn't been enough time for anyone to do enough sleuthing to work out what's really happening. I guess we'll find out in time whether this is really a big problem or just a flash in the pan. Being a safety critical engineer I'm much more interested in the nature of the problem rather than the scale of the disruption, but quite often the media stops being interested as soon as the problem is fixed. So unless this ends up being a long disruption (like boeing's recent groundings) I guess we'll probably never know.