Letter: Rail hopes unrealistic
The disappointment felt by those whose hopes to see the Shrewsbury to Wolverhampton rail line electrified have been dashed is understandable but unrealistic.
About three-quarters of the passenger trains on this line continue beyond Shrewsbury either to Wrexham, Chester and beyond or to Welshpool, Newtown and on towards Aberystwyth or Pwllheli. To electrify the line as far as Shrewsbury would merely transfer the inconvenience of a traction change from Wolverhampton to Shrewsbury.
The real bugbear so far as the development of through services is concerned is the convoluted system of privatisation that has bedevilled our railway system for the last two decades.
When the LMS and the Great Western ran through carriages to the capital via Stafford and Wolverhampton, they provided a service on their own track using their own trains, picking up and setting down passengers at any point along the route where the train stopped.
As the history of 'Wrexham & Shropshire' demonstrated, we now have a situation when the major provider of the mainline services between the West Midlands and London, having failed to run a Shropshire-London service, can protect its taxpayer-subsidized monopoly by preventing any other undertaking attempting to do this, from picking up or setting down passengers in the Birmingham and Black-Country area and forcing it onto a slow, convoluted route between Wolverhampton and London.
The system is cursed with a combination of the worst aspects of nationalised bureaucratic inertia and 'get rich quick' monopoly capitalism. As a result we have the highest fares in Europe and the lowest percentage of electrified route-mileage.
It is small wonder that the continental railway undertakings that operate so many of our train services refer to Britain as 'Treasure Island'.
David Burton, Wellington
