Opponents of the government’s proposed high-speed rail link from London to the north claim it is a white elephant being pursued on grounds of vanity when proper alternatives have not been considered (Report, 19 July). But we spent the best part of 15 years attempting to transform our busiest railway, the west coast mainline, from Victorian relic to 21st-century marvel. The route modernisation was a disaster, forensically described by your newspaper (The £10bn rail crash, 1 April 2004) as a “saga of incompetence, greed and delusion”. Originally predicated on the use of utterly untried signalling technology, the cost soared from £2bn in 1998 to £8.9bn by the time of the project’s conclusion in 2009. Read More
