The "North East" section of the
gov's list explicitly mentions Leamside reopening:
Reopening stations: Communities in the North East will be reconnected, including a new station at Ferryhill, Co Durham. The Leamside line, closed in 1964, will also be reopened.
It's hard to think what services could use the Leamside line if it were reopened. The issue being that any services would still hit capacity issues south of Ferryhill, so there's no new long distance services that could be added.
It could form part of the T&W Metro, though you think that would be mentioned if it that were the intention. It would be a long way to run a Metro service to reopen all of it, but if you only open as far as Fencehouses then it could work perhaps.
A Newcastle - Middlesbrough Northern service could come onto it, using the Stillington branch. That would fit with reopening Ferryhill. Such a service would be used, but it would be a lot of money spent to reopen a line to run a service that would between Teesside and Tyneside not serve anywhere very conveniently. You could have stations at:
* Washington, but not in the town centre
* Fencehouses or Shiney Row, but the settlements here are quite low density and distributed so there's no location which is all that convenient
* Belmont or Sherburn, though really Durham would be better served by having more services at its main station
You could reroute the TPE service along here but then who serves Chester-le-Street? I don't suppose CrossCountry will fancy it. And that seems no good for Durham which could go from one station to two stations 4-5 miles apart but with minimal extra services. And this wouldn't help congestion on the ECML because the TPE services would rejoin it south of Ferryhill.
I guess you could make some of these through services from Morpeth or the Metrocentre of some such in order to develop regional connections a bit more, though I doubt there is huge demand here.
It's not that enticing really.