I recently travelled by TGV for some 300 miles from South East France to Paris. I enjoyed long views over farmland in gently undulating countryside, with scarcely a village or town in sight, mainly the occasional farmhouse in a sparsely populated landscape, where there was insignificant traffic to be inconvenienced by the line. (The experience was similar travelling across the Po Valley from Milan.) How different from the circumstances in which HS2 would have to operate! — Christopher Swain, Henham, Essex