THE advocates of the London – Birmingham high speed rail link claim it is necessary to reduce current air, car and HGV transport. It appears there is currently no such air transport, the line is passenger, not freight, and it will be non-stop.

Therefore, it will not reduce car journeys for people living in between who, one would have thought would be the majority of the people more likely to need to travel to either city but not at all hours of the day and/or night. The secondary benefit is to reduce the journey time by 20 minutes from the current rail service which could be achieved with a non-stop service on the current line.

The question that the advocates never answer is who are all the people wanting to travel non-stop between London and Birmingham – and to the cities on the proposed extended route – at all hours of the day, necessary to make the line financially viable, and why is 20 minutes so important to them to merit the enormous impact of such a line?

I can think of only one source of such customers. Airline passengers making interconnecting flights that cannot otherwise be made without the airport – runway expansions that have been sought for years.

PD Somerville, Coningsby Road, High Wycombe.