False promises

I recently came across RAIL 701 (July 2012), which carried the fantastic headline “Midlands’ Electric Dream Comes True”.

David Cameron’s £9 billion rail boost included Swansea electrification, the Cardiff Valleys, Bedford to Sheffield, OxfordCoventry-Nuneaton, and the electric spine from Southampton. The latter meant a cheaper railway, according to then-Transport Secretary Justine Greening.

What exactly has happened? What exactly is a ‘cheaper railway’? Where are these projects? We do have to understand that times change and ‘things happen’, but what rankles is the brazen two-faced attitude of governments.

If they cannot carry out promises, why make them? It leaves the public in a state if disbelief in anything the Government says. The continual back-tracking does them no favours.

And being from ‘up North’, I now regard George Osborne’s HS3 proposal and the Northern Powerhouse as being the epitome of political trickery and contempt for regions of the UK that had really hoped for better and which have now been duped.

If some of the massive overseas aid was diverted to real improvements in our infrastructure, this country might live up to what the politicians say they will provide.

Quite honestly, I see no hope now of electrification across the network.

And as I write this, I have just read a report in The Lancet which says millions of people are suffering from the effects of diesel fumes, and how the Government is phasing out the sale of diesel cars by 2040. Yet diesel trains are now being built instead of fully electric, and national main route electrification abandoned. W M Bowmer, Sheffield