YP Letters: An interpreter needed for Hammond's railway rhetoric

Chancellor Philip Hammond during a visit to Leeds earlier this week.

IT can’t have been easy for the Chancellor, Philip Hammond, to try to retrieve something from Chris Grayling’s recent, crass railway wreckage (The Yorkshire Post, September 5). In doing so, has he added yet more to the breathtaking Westminster lexicon of obfuscation?

“We should start from outputs and work backwards”.

The North’s railways have, comparatively speaking, been going backwards for decades, so we’re used to that. “We are trying to deliver a result for passengers, not some conceptual thing based on inputs.” Is there an interpreter available and does Mr Hammond accept that the North’s “results” over said decades – Tory and Labour – have been abysmal?

The Manchester to Leeds line has presumably been “a difficult piece of railway” for the last 150 years or so. Whatever this may mean, has it ever impeded electrification in London and the Home Counties?

I hope Mr Hammond didn’t find we Northern peasants to be too revolting. Perhaps he should consider that, unless serious progress is made quickly then, come the next election, we most definitely will be.

From: Philip N Mortimer, Bognor Regis, West Sussex.

THE announcement regarding decisions to postpone or cancel several railway electrification projects can only be described as fundamentally flawed. The decision will leave several major cities dependent upon diesel-powered bi-modal trains for the foreseeable future.

This is a cheap fix and follows a dismal pattern regarding the electrification of the rail system.

Chris Grayling is being disingenuous when he alleges that bi-modal trains will be an acceptable alternative. They are a cheap fix to paper over the cracks caused by meddling and incompetence within the Department for Transport and Network Rail.

From: Shaun Kavanagh, Leeds.

WHY is it that the only people who fail to see that cycle lanes, created by Leeds City Council, are an inexcusable and total waste of good money, are the Labour councillors themselves?

From: P Baggaley, Hull.

REGARDING the driverless trucks about to be unleashed in convoys of three, I seem to remember that the Government would not allow road trains on our motorways. Surely a road train would be much greener as it would only need one operator and one tractor unit?