SIR – This week, Transport Secretary Lord Adonis will announce plans for a high-speed rail network linking Britain’s major cities.
Initially linking Manchester, Birmingham and London, the 225 mph tracks will later extend to the East Midlands, Yorkshire, the North East and Scotland, narrowing the north-south divide by helping new businesses in Britain’s recession-hit regions and, crucially, reducing road congestion and pollution and the need for air travel.
Thousands of construction and maintenance jobs will be created. With crude oil becoming scarcer, railways must inevitably become the primary means of shifting goods in bulk over long distances, and the fuel-guzzling, ten-wheeled 40-ton truck will become a rarity.
However, praise be to the myopic inertia of the civic guardians of Sleepy Valley, for the good people of Bradford will be spared the horrors of seeing the iron horses traversing the city centre between two cross-linked stations, spreading public alarm and consternation and stampeding the flocks of sheep grazing on the lush grass where historic buildings once stood. When the last motorist has been repelled from the city by the courageous army of uniformed “parking service” attendants, a scene of quiet, medieval village tranquillity will at last prevail. Noel A Shaw, Thornton Road, Bradford
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