Sir – At Christmas, Network Rail (NR) installed new points at Wolvercote where trains from its new loop will rejoin the main line going north. Laying the loop itself continues.

Railfuture commends NR and the DfT for the investment, and Wolvercote residents for bearing any disturbance. The Great Western Railway built a loop in exactly the same place before most of us were born. BR removed it in 1963 after losing traffic to roads.

Railway linesides are wildlife corridors, but railway land’s purpose is to run trains. We should be sanguine about reinstating a track to protect environments more sensitive and biodiverse than the scrub and young trees NR has removed.

John Thompson (Letters, January 2) claims the loop obtrudes as much as the University apartments in Roger Dudman Way. In fact, unlike those flats, the loop breaks neither Oxford’s skyline nor any planning rule.

Trains have borne passengers through Britain’s landscape since 1807 and freight long before that. If Port Meadow’s attraction depends “on the surrounding natural screen which creates its rural character” then it ceased being rural when the railway opened in 1850.

If trains are not “rural” then neither are 20th-century Wolvercote houses whose backs look so suburban from Port Meadow, nor rowing coaches with loudhailers repeatedly motor-boating between Godstow and Binsey. Enjoying Port Meadow requires willingness to share it. Trains have long been visible from much of the meadow.

Their passengers, like Wolvercote residents, deserve to enjoy its expanse from their windows.

In a few years, NR will electrify Oxford to Nuneaton as part of a £1.4bn “Electric Spine” between Southampton, the Midlands and Yorkshire. Rail is among the lowest-carbon, long-distance transport modes, but electric trains cause 30 per cent lower emissions than diesel ones. Overhead wires will be seen from Port Meadow, but carbon reduction is vital for environmental survival.

Hugh Jaeger

Railfuture — Thames Valley Branch, Oxford