A debt our children will be paying off

In the same issue you reported the vast improvements to the service on the Chiltern Line which have been achieved following a relatively modest investment. Similar improvements could be achieved on the West Coast Main Line through Coventry for a tiny fraction of the cost of building HS2, improvements described in the proposal for Rail Package 2 (RP2) by the Atkins Group. RP2 essentially comprises many small upgrades to the existing infrastructure to remove bottlenecks and pinch-points; the combined effect of which would be to cut the London to Coventry journey time by about 15 minutes and at the same time enable more frequent services to intermediate destinations.

Furthermore, the benefits of RP2 would be delivered progressively, not after ten years of chaos and disruption during the building of HS2 from London to (near) Birmingham; remember this ‘Phase 1’ will have no intermediate stops and benefit nobody along its route. The greatest fear must be that Phase 1 would prove HS2 to be the white elephant it surely is and that the northern extensions would never be built, leaving the nation with a legacy £30+ billion pound debt which our children and theirs will be paying off for generations to come!

There is still time to write to your Member of Parliament and urge him to vote against the HS2 project and to convince his colleagues of whatever political persuasion to do likewise. - J N Price, Mountbatten Avenue, Kenilworth.