Sir – Network Rail’s new Oxford Parkway station and rebuilt Bicester Town station will open this year. Chiltern trains will serve them, and next year will reach Oxford itself. Each station may soon gain several hundred thousand passengers a year.

The two stations are rapidly taking shape. Sadly the shape is in each case a shed. And will either have platform canopies to shelter passengers to and from their trains?

Chiltern runs comfortable and popular trains but its station comfort is less consistent. Fifteen years ago it built Warwick Parkway: well-sited, but each platform has no canopy and only a bus shelter, despite being on an exposed embankment. Stairs to each platform have an ugly canopy, capriciously set too high to give any shelter. 620,000 passengers a year endure this gratuitously nasty station in all weathers.

Ian East (Letters, February 12) warns that Bicester’s London Road level crossing will shut for nearly half of each hour to let Chiltern’s trains pass through. Soon East West Rail’s Oxford-Milton Keynes trains will join them: another very beneficial new railway, but the crossing will be shut even more.

Five years ago, I called for a road bridge. Instead we will get only a pedestrian and cycle bridge.

Bicester’s road congestion will increase. Even if all waiting motorists switch off their engines (which they won’t), emissions will increase. More will use the A41 bypass south-west of the town, increasing local traffic on what should be a trunk road.

The new line’s users will not all be the wealthy commuters whom Ian decries. Many people on modest incomes cannot live near their jobs. But UK regular rail fares are Europe’s highest.

There are discounts for one-off journeys, but passengers struggle to find them. A secondary market of Internet middlemen now exploits them. Fares must be made simpler and more affordable.

Hugh Jaeger, Oxford