GOVERNMENT consultants are now working in the North to look for ways of making economies on our railways (Evening Press, February 3).

My first reaction concerned the environment and that Tony Blair, who talks so much about global warming, should be willing to consider pushing yet more of us off the trains into cars. That is almost beyond belief.

But this has immediate reference to individual lives. Trains are one of the safest forms of transport.

Every time a line or a station closes, the road accident rate rises. There are still many thousands of homes, devastated forever by the effects of the first "Beeching" cuts.

If the Government had the guts to take the railways back into public ownership again, and coupled this with an outright publicity drive to make rail travel cheap, convenient and attractive as it once was when there were lines even to remote towns and villages, the financial issue would be less acute.

But no transport department during the last 50 years has shown such initiative.

Near York, lines to Scarborough and Harrogate would seem most at risk. Both offer some relief, and could offer more, to nearby main roads. Meanwhile the reinstatement of the old York-Hull line via Pocklington is urgently needed to relieve pressure on the A1079.

We need more, not fewer, railways. A great social life-saving asset is being put at risk for the second time.This is a moral issue. What can we do about it?

Roy Stevens,

Willow Bank,

New Earswick, York.

Updated: 09:34 Friday, February 11, 2005