Options include St Neots

Regarding the letters from John Hayward and Ray Porter, and the route of the Central Section of East West Rail ( Open Access, RAIL 851): the starting point is the 2013 Transport Strategy for Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire.

It planned a guided or ‘highquality’ bus route from Cambridge to Cambourne with a possible extension to St Neots, with the main route to the town shown as a new A428 dual carriageway.

A possible rail route was shown indicatively as a dead straight line from Cambridge towards Bedford, crossing the East Coast Main Line near Sandy.

In 2014, St Neots featured in the East West Rail Consortium’s Conditional Outputs Statement

(COS). But the COS didn’t select any route to or from St Neots as a ‘priority journey’ - the ‘very high priority’ journeys were Cambridge to Bedford, Northampton, Luton and St Albans (Milton Keynes missing out for some reason). The COS drove the planners towards a straight-line route from Cambridge towards Oxford to keep the journey times westward to an absolute minimum.

The Network Rail/Jacobs report of 2016 developed this theme and looked in detail at a number of route options.

One option ran near Tempsford - about five miles south of St Neots, and which could (at least in engineering terms) easily be pushed further north. However, yet again, the report came down in favour of the straightest route between Cambridge and Bletchley.

The Network Rail brochure that publicised the report concentrated on a Cambridge-Sandy-Bedford corridor, but a future phase will review “broad routeings within the corridor”.

Given that there has been no public consultation except for that 2013 Transport Strategy, it seems there is all to play for. It hinges really on the public challenging the idea of a fast cross-country route by-passing towns outside the corridor. John Henderson, Eltisley