Philip Hammond MP wants to unite England by railway.

When I was a boy it was possible to get a train from Lydbrook Junction along the Wye to Ross-on-Wye (an impressive station in Cantilupe Road) via Kerne Bridge and Walford Halt, thence to Hereford or Gloucester and so to Paddington.

Alternatively, one might travel from Lydbrook Junction along the Wye to Symonds Yat, Hadnock Halt, Monmouth May Hill and Monmouth Troy, thence either to Pontypool Road or Severn Tunnel Junction and so to Bristol Temple Meads, Taunton (avoiding on occasion Weston-super-Mare), Exeter St David's and Dawlish.

Thanks to Mr Hammond's predecessors in the Conservative and Unionist party all this was destroyed in the 1960s by that energetic ignoramus Richard Beeching.

The Conservatives have no love of England, only the love of money. They need to learn that England is more than London and Birmingham and financial dealings in the City (at the same time as taking advice from Rupert Murdoch, an American citizen, by the back door).

In those distant days of the 1950s we built our own engines in Swindon and manufactured our own carriages. We did not go in servile fashion to Germany for help. The Coalition is a disgrace to England and to England's past. But what can you expect when they all seem to have read philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford?

– Gerald Morgan, Trinity College, Dublin 2.