VALE of White Horse district councillor Bob Johnston invites critics to say how the extra demand for rail services can be accommodated and refers to overcrowded London terminals (Oxford Mail letters, July 1) .

It’s true that we need to increase rail capacity for passengers and freight, but spending £32bn between 2017 and 2032 on a new line from London to Leeds via Birmingham is not the best way.

Some existing lines could be four-tracked, such as Banbury-Leamington, while some closed ones could be reopened, for example Aylesbury-Leicester and Honeybourne-Stratford.

The lines to Glasgow and Edinburgh were modernised to take 140mph trains but they didn’t upgrade the signalling.

Get that done and you would have London-Scotland journeys in well under four hours on what, by European standards, are already high speed lines.

As for the London termini, Crossrail will, by 2017, take nearly half the traffic through Paddington and Liverpool Street stations and a significant amount of Euston traffic, if Milton Keynes stopping services are routed through it.

The latter only needs half-a-mile of new line near Old Oak Common to link the two main lines. St Pancras boasts six Eurostar platforms but is only used by two trains an hour, while Waterloo has an almost new but unused Eurostar terminal.

With these relatively modest improvements, and with better use of existing capacity, it would be possible to run a non-stop Birmingham-Paddington service in little more than an hour, while trains from Edinburgh and Newcastle could use St Pancras.

There would be enough money left over for many other improvements – such as extending the Heathrow Express to St Pancras in a new tunnel, and a few urban transport improvements outside London. A rapid transit system for Oxford wouldn’t go amiss.

Even if you accept the case for a brand new HS2 across open country (which I and many others don’t), the words eggs and baskets must surely come to mind.

PATRICK ADAMS, Yarnscombe, Devon