THERE are many problems with HS2 – cost, environmental impacts and the time it will take to deliver, amongst them (Tom Richmond, The Yorkshire Post, October 9).

Yes, it may free up capacity elsewhere on the network, but it’s a very expensive and time consuming way of delivering a relatively small benefit.

If, as your correspondent David Reed claims, “our Victorian railway system is short of capacity,” it is because 5,000 miles of track were ripped up in the 1960s on Dr Beeching’s recommendations, a piece of myopic, short-term thinking if ever there was one.

Leeds Station. Picture: Danny Lawson/PA.

It would be quicker and cheaper to invest in updating and replacing local railway services to benefit villages, market towns and old-fashioned cathedral cities, instead of a vanity project which will really only connect the nation’s urban sprawls.

From: Bill Hobman, North Yorkshire.

MANY of the comments relating to the Leeds section of HS2 are rightly in the context of ‘levelling up’ between the North and South.

However, on the subject of the role of HS2 in ‘levelling up’ terms, there is also the matter of east/west levelling. If there is no committed and scheduled and financed Leeds link for HS2, the playing field remains unlevel so far as Yorkshire and further north is concerned.

If you were looking in the to invest in the North, where would you go? Manchester with an international airport and HS2, when compared to Leeds with a tourist airport (partly resolved with Northern Powerhouse Rail providing high quality links to Manchester Airport), and no committed HS2 link?

In order to level up the imbalance and simultaneously avoid the creation of a new one, both parts of HS2 are fundamental and should be part of the same decision. Otherwise the whole business case for HS2 at all is eroded.

HS2 will transform North; it is not a vanity project – Yorkshire Post Letters

GET Yorkshire’s derelict train lines back in operation – not just in one area but across the whole of the region. This vast county has been forgotten for too long.

This can then be used for transporting goods, and for commuting to work which will be good for the environment if electrified lines are installed.

There are far to many lorries on the roads today – let’s start loading goods on trains once more. It’s quicker and cost effective.

Update Yorkshire's railways instead of spending on HS2 - Yorkshire Post Letters