Sir – Taxpayers’ payments to National Rail are running at £5bn per year and will continue to do so for years to come.

That amounts to a subsidy of 16 pence per passenger-mile travelled, or to annual payments of £500,000 per year for every mile of double-track railway, or to £200 for every household in the land.

It arises at a time when half of us use rail less than once a year and when the better off travel four times as far by rail as do the poor. Furthermore, including trespassers but not suicides, rail kills more people per passenger-mile than does the motorway and trunk road system.

As to its green credentials, rail emits almost twice as much carbon dioxide per passenger-km as does the express coach.

The Chiltern scheme is to cost £140m. That amounts to £12m per mile of new track, the same as required to build a six-lane motorway.

The proposal will carry a trivial two trains per hour in each direction, equivalent to perhaps six express coaches, a flow so small that it would be lost completely if it were on Oxford’s bypass.

Despite Chiltern being in receipt of subsidy amounting to £12m per year, not counting endless capital expenditure, the claim is made that this scheme will repay not only its operating and maintenance costs but the capital of £140m. Since rail has been making losses in the billions of pounds for decades it seems entirely unlikely that that can be true.

Instead it will be the taxpayer who picks up the £140m tab, equivalent to £2,000 for every household in Oxford. No wonder the nation is bankrupt.

Paul Withrington, Northampton