LETTER: Here's a cheap alternative to HS2 - get up earlier...

Do we really need it? A solution would be to scrap HS2 and for whoever wants to use the service to get out of bed half an hour earlier and catch an earlier train. Simple, and it costs nowt. Try it, you might even enjoy the early mornings the same as most workers do.

Mick Horsman,

Moorland Road, York

A dose of salts for our wheezing transport pony

One of the great pleasures of life is a relaxing and stress free ride on the railway. Although our once-mighty steel horse is often now more a wheezing pony, I hear that the breed may be about to receive a reviving shot of a reinvigorating medicine: the infrastructure injection that is HS2.

The purpose of this extensive (for how much longer remains to be seen) and expensive scheme is to cure that other ailing beast of the industrial revolution, The North.

Now I got to pondering, over my coffee and croissants. If the object of the exercise is really designed to improve life for us ensconced in Great Britain’s bleaker outposts, surely common sense dictated a starting line somewhere in those self same semi-derelict environs and a completion point at that city of gold in the south.

Richard D Bowen,

Farrar Street,York