Thanks for Ian Jack’s interesting piece (Amid the weeds, this new rail line will be clattering through 75 miles of history, 10 December). However, he was perhaps incorrect in stating that the Oxford University railway club never travelled the line. A book of the line shows photographs taken on the University Railway Society (presumably the same) rail tours in 1981 and 1982 that passed through Verney Junction. The book also records other special passenger trains that ran on the line up to the early 1990s. I once travelled from Paddington to Corby on one such train. Ironically, the line was closed to passengers in 1967, the same year that saw the creation of the new town of Milton Keynes through which it ran. Such was the lack of vision in those days that Milton Keynes was not the only new town that saw its railway passenger services withdrawn soon after designation. The Milton Keynes Development Corporation tried to encourage rail travel by sponsoring Christmas shopping trips from Aylesbury and elsewhere during the 1980s. These called at many of the old stations, including I am sure Verney Junction.

Sadly, like Ian Jack, locals share his pessimism over whether we will see the line restored in our lifetimes. Typically, the government is funding a Cambridge-Oxford road upgrade at the same time.

Philip Ashbourn

Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire

• Ian Jack’s wonderfully evocative article highlighted the potential of the now committed Varsity or East West Rail line to serve the six fastest-growing cities in England.

But “Verney Junction’s days are over” was, we hope, unduly pessimistic as we are promoting this old station and its flat, relatively empty landscape as a new garden village and, we hope, new town. The location’s clearly apparent strengths can, we are arguing, be the basis for relieving the surrounding towns and villages of never-ending development pressures and unsustainable new housing.

We hope to make maximum use of the government’s commitment to this new infrastructure and its non-green-belt location to provide an environmentally as well as economically supportable new community. If we can succeed this would perhaps, at last, fulfil the vision of those who have gone before and give Ian Jack his reason for the station to exist.

Jonathan Naughton

Partner, Garden Cities LLP

• “The ‘Varsity Line’ … did people ever call it that?” So asks Ian Jack. About 40 years ago, in a campaign to cut car use, the Milton Keynes Transport Users’ Group (MK Tug), urged the restoration of the railway which could make connections with the universities at Cambridge and Cranfield, the Open University at Milton Keynes, the University of Buckingham and the two universities in Oxford. Of course, we called it the Varsity Line.

Christopher Nankivell

(Former chair, MK Tug), Birmingham

• Re Chris Grayling’s Oxford-Cambridge line, let’s be clear. This was not on the list of lines to be closed in Beeching’s report. Even more clear (and I am ashamed) is that it was closed by Labour (Barbara Castle has a lot to answer for). Worse, the trackbed was not preserved. Houses were built at Potton station and other areas towards Cambridge – all of which increases the cost of reinstatement. Add this to the loss of the Midland Main Line Derby-Matlock-Manchester and the original HS2 – the Great Central through Leicester and Nottingham to Sheffield and Manchester – the first of which again was not proposed for closure – and we look incredibly shortsighted. And now we complain of lack of capacity!

By all means close uneconomic lines, but don’t build on the right of way. New businesses and new housing can change the economics within a decade. Remember too that what was closed might have been an inefficient labour-intensive steam-era semaphore-signalled railway, not a modern diesel or electric line.

Robert Bracegirdle

Gawsworth, Cheshire

• The apparent “brainwashing” of children in schools along the HS2 route, supposedly encouraging them to support the scheme (HS2 rail firm stands accused of ‘Orwellian’ bias in schools’, 13 December), carried a whiff of deja vu. In the heady and distant days of plans to have Eurostar trains coming directly from France to Manchester via Crewe, Cheshire schoolchildren took part in art competitions, producing wonderful colourful paintings, based on French artists’ styles, extolling the virtues of getting on a train in Crewe and getting off at some exotic place like the south of France. Many of these were even displayed on the stations, and on an immense sign at Longsight locomotive depot in Manchester, where the Eurostar trains were going to be based, bearing the caption, in a great visual fanfare, “Eurostar est ici…”

Sadly, the art, the sign, and the promise gradually began to fade, peel and fall off. The trains never arrived, never departed, and aspiration and enthusiasm were crushed. So I’m not holding my breath about HS2, nor do I believe I have enough breaths left in me ever to see it happen. The criminality here is – and was then – to build up young hopes, and then knock them away again.

Jeff Teasdale

(Former art and design advisory teacher) Macclesfield, Cheshire

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