Improve northern rail links before building HS2: Yorkshire Post Letters

Should HS2 take precedence over improvements to local rail services?

HS2 might well, as some suggest, be essential to the North’s economic development (Andrew Adonis, The Yorkshire Post, January 23).

But, if that is the case, it seems to be starting at the wrong end.

As it was with the motorway system, so with HS2: London to Birmingham first, with the northern cities left waiting until at least 2030, probably much later, before they are linked in.

A decision on the future of HS2 is due next month.

Far better, in my view, to improve Northern links first, between Sheffield, Leeds, the North East, Hull and Manchester.

Help this wide region to realise its full economic potential, hopefully one which grasps tackling climate change as an opportunity not a problem. Then bring Birmingham into the fold.

But let London wait.

Perhaps by the time HS2 reaches it, the capital city might then find it has greater need to connect with the North than the North has need to connect with London.

Cabinet minister has ‘gut feeling’ HS2 will go ahead

From: Graham Brown, Wakefield.

ANDREW Adonis is a Hampstead-born, Oxford-educated, Remain-supporting academic who thinks that we should have HS2.

Apart from the damage and destruction it will cause, the economic argument does not add up.

All it does is link the metropolitan elite of London with their imitators in Leeds and Manchester to the detriment of all those in its way.

From: Andrew Mercer, Guiseley.

IF HS2 is to increase capacity, can details on extra services be given to local commuters?  They might just – in turn – feel more sympathetic towards the project.

From: Betty Henry, Doncaster.

PLANES fly above the clouds in bright sunshine. They have extensive curved surfaces. If solar fabric firm Solivus lives up to expectations, maybe those petrol-guzzling private jets and huge holidaymaker-filled planes may one day be superceded by electric planes.

From: Nat Wendel, Hull.

AS the East Coast of Yorkshire falls into the sea through the effects of climate change, up the road the good folk at Leeds Bradford Airport want to almost double the amount of passengers and so, in turn, carbon emissions in the next 10 years. Yorkshire’s own climate change contradiction.