Rail wail? Not from me

READER Mike Rawson makes a bold statement that no one wants HS2. As a frequent traveller, it can’t come soon enough for me.

It will free up capacity on existing rail lines and enable freight to be taken off our clogged roads, to say nothing of improving frequency on overcrowded commuter routes.

How do we finance it? A more realistic foreign aid budget might help.

LEN MUIR, Oxted, Surrey. THE HS2 trains will travel at 230mph, but the drivers don’t yet have any experience. The drivers of steam engines worked on the railways for many years before they were put in charge of a train.

In the Fifties, I fired an engine in my job as a fireman at Crewe, in Cheshire. I will never forget the sight of the wreckage at Harrow & Wealdstone station in London in 1952, when an overnight express train crashed into the rear of a local passenger train and was then struck again by an express train at 60mph.

Some 112 people were killed and 340 injured. It was the worst peacetime crash in Britain.

GEOFF HILLYARD, Crewe, Cheshire.