Letter: Do we need a high speed London rail link?
Tuesday 8th March 2011, 6:00AM GMT.
Letter: It is incredible that this Tory-led Government is planning to spend billions on a marginally faster rail service between London and Birmingham while at the same time, due to the removal of government subsidies, councils are being forced to kill off rural bus services – such as in the region of Shropshire – which are a lifeline for many people and cost much less.
Of course the London to Birmingham service will provide a quick kill for the private firms involved in its construction.
But this is no surprise when profiteers who are both supportive of and supported by the Government only want to benefit themselves.
Graham Jones
Wolverhampton
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I stopped reading at “Tory-led”. Yawn. Change the record. The high speed rail link proposals were formalised in January 2009 (Labour were in power then) and had the support of all three main parties. The high speed rail link is not a party political issue.
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I am definately not a tory supporter but I am 100% behind the plans for a high speed rail network. Investment in transport and other infrastructure is incredibly important for our long term economic future. Lets not forget that our existing creaking sytems are hardly state of the art.
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I have to say I am not convinced by it either. Most of the proposed benefit quoted (£44bn) appears to be in the construction and ongoing maintenance and staffing of the line. The overall effect of the high speed line will be a reduction in the quantity and speed of services to other stations – this is freely admitted in the consultation document. To me, this makes it an idea straight from the “let’s build a giant wooden badger” school of economics. Think how big a £32bn wooden badger would be. How many jobs it would create during its construction. Think how many tourists from around the world would come to see it.
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It’s not incredible at all and to compare the two is naive in the extreme.
One is no more than a loss making public service with few users (and even fewer paying users) and the other a link to the economic hub of our country from which many, many people in Shropshire make a living and pay a princely sum to do so.
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I beleive we do need this link
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With Virgin proposing a time of 62mins between Brum and the capital and D.B/Chiltern via Banbury not far behind with their new timetable later this year, then HS2 becomes only marginally faster. If walk/taxi time is taken into account accessing its new terminus in Curzon Street, it will actually be a longer journey for many. There simply is not room for 3 operators between Birmingham and London, so after spending billions on HS2, taxpayers will then end up bailing it out too! Cutting bus services (our biggest provider of public transport with more people using the bus than train services) whilst spending billions on the HS2 white elephant is economically and environmentally completely misguided. Improve our existing trains and save our buses instead!
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