I MUST respond to Howard Curran of Crewe.

He raises the ghost of APT, the so called tilting train. He infers that the abandonment of the project was an example of progress and future prosperity being thrown away.

As a lifelong rail man, surely he should have known why it was abandoned.

The concept of ‘Active Tilt’, a computer controlled hydraulic system was designed and proven by engineers brought in by British Rail in the early 1970s.

It was not designed by British Rail’s in-house chief mechanical and electrical engineers department.

Therein was sown the seeds of the failure to progress the project to a successful conclusion. It was not abandoned on cost grounds.

Nowhere in the archives is there any mention of costs being the reason for abandoning the project, though it seems many media personnel who experienced the failure of the train due to freezing of the mechanism on a Glasgow to London trial run, that forced the trial to be halted just south of Glasgow, may well have had something to do with the eventual cancellation of the project.

To compare APT to HS2 is to compare, in a way, a mouse to an elephant; such is the difference in scale of both projects.

While the costs of developing APT are not available, no way would have cost the then equivalent of £70b, which is the projected cost of HS2.

I commend Mr Curran to read all the reports prepared by the Public Accounts Committee, the Institute of Directors, the New Economic Foundation, the Major Projects Authority Report – oh not the latter, as the Government won’t publish it at the moment because it is rumoured to be critical of HS2.

Ewen Simpson Mid Cheshire Against HS2 Whatcroft