Brunel would be sobbing in his grave

POOR little Portishead. I feel so sorry for Bristol’s surf-loving little brother by the sea.

The town has grown exponentially over the last 20 years. One of the fastest growing places in Europe.

Cleverly built new estates resembling Cornish fishing villages house tens of thousands of new residents, most of whom work in Bristol.

With plenty of shops and a worldclass marina it is a great place to live. Except for one awful fact: there is but one road in and one road out of Portishead.

Even in the current crisis, the traffic in and out is always very busy and often gridlocked in rush hour.

Huge dangerous queues build up on the motorway junction near the town every evening. I don’t usually feel sorry for motorists, but here they have no choice but to drive. Because, incredibly, Portishead has no railway station! It lost the one it had to Tory cuts back in the 1960s and everyone agrees a new one is badly needed.

There have been dozens of attempts to reinstate the line over the last 20 years. But it gets put back again and again.

Unbelievably, the line already exists for 90% of its length. It just needs a mile or two extra into Portishead. The reasons given by the local authority and rail funding bodies are laughable. For instance, in 2016 ‘the bridges were too weak for passenger services’. Yet every day tens of thousands of tons of freight already run over them and anyway how difficult can it be to strengthen a couple of bridges?

The latest feeble excuse is that the effects of Covid-19 will put the work back until at least 2024. Isn’t it ironic that a couple of years ago millions of pounds, far more than the money needed for the Portishead railway, was quickly found to improve the Portishead motorway junction?

This complicated work was finished in just a few weeks. That didn’t make very much difference, so yet more millions of pounds immediately appeared to double up the road lanes into the town itself. Meanwhile no funding or work for the desperately needed new railway was forthcoming. Yet it would make the road traffic problems vanish overnight!

You might have thought that politicians local and national would have done all they could to shame the relevant bodies into action. But no. WECA chief Tim Bowles simply appears in the paper once every couple of weeks with the same suit and smile, merely parroting the details of various new projects in our area designed and funded by Whitehall or until recently the

European Community.

Meanwhile in Bristol, Mayor Rees seems to have nothing to say on the matter despite the benefits it will obviously bring to Bristol. What would Isambard Kingdom Brunel say about this fiasco? He, who covered the country in brand new railways using nothing more than a set-square, tape measure, some pencils, and a plentiful supply of cigars. I think he would be sobbing in his grave.

Ernest B Skidmore Montpelier, Bristol