I agree with Susan Wade Weeks that full-price rail fares to London are expensive (Rail “scandal”, Letters, March 19), but she is wrong if she imagines that most people turn up on the day without pre-booking, and pay these high prices.

When National Express bid for the east coast franchise I told them, and the Secretary of State for Transport that I wanted to see more people able to use cheap tickets. Sixty per cent of their passengers now travel on discounted fares, and some tickets cost less than when the Tories left office 13 years ago.

When I spoke in Parliament, I mentioned the £5 fare because that is what my wife paid to go to London the previous weekend. Last week, I bought a £25 first class single back from London.

Susan’s claim that Labour has priced people off the railway is false. We have hugely increased rail investment since we were elected, and the number of rail passengers has doubled. The Conservative Party’s plans to cut public expenditure, however, would increase rail fares, and probably price passengers off the railway.

Hugh Bayley
MP for City of York, Holgate Road, York.



• I am writing to say how much I agree with the Tory “spokesman” Susan Wade Weeks. She quite rightly states: “A Government that does not support and encourage rail travel is not fit for purpose.”

How she, a Tory, has the audacity to be critical of any government over rail in our country beggars belief. As your memory is clearly faulty, madam, look in your history books. You will find the Tories were responsible for half the network closing to the present 11,000 miles.

She also must be incredibly naive or stupid to slap every ex-York railway worker across the face with this drivel. As she obviously is unaware, the Tories privatised York Carriageworks, then cynically cut off money to replace 30-year-old rolling stock, resulting in the closure of the works causing the loss of 3,000 jobs, vastly reduced redundancy payments and inferior pension rights.

This despite the heroic attempts by The Press to raise a petition of more than 15,000 names ,which the Tories callously ignored.

I can raise many more issues over Tory mismanagement; I can quote Tory versus Labour records on railway infrastructure, rolling stock and stations, plus transparent Tory future plans.

If the lady does want to put right a terrible wrong her party imposed on rail workers in York, Derby and Crewe, she can show what the New Tories are made of by petitioning Parliament to have free and privilege rail passes restored to 8,000 workers and their families.

It is high time this injustice is put right. Men came from all over our region to work in York, so can just one of the region’s MPs, be it red, yellow or even blue, have the guts to fight to get our rights retrospectively reinstated, because of what happened to us over the disastrous privatisations.

William Moore
Lochrin Place, York.