Sir, Building East-West Rail by 2011 would be welcome (Report, September 15), and in the meantime the existing Bicester Town to Oxford service should be made to run more quickly (Letters, September 15).

The good news is that Bicester Village is offering to fund track improvements between Bicester Town and Oxford. This would reduce Oxford to Bicester journeys to 20 minutes or less.

We now need Network Rail to plan the work and carry it out. The East-West Rail feasibility study endorses reopening the line between Bicester Town and Bletchley, allowing a direct Oxford-Bicester- Bletchley-Bedford service.

It also endorses reopening the line between Aylesbury and Calvert, allowing an Aylesbury-Bletchley-Milton Keynes service. The bad news is that the Bedford-Cambridge section of the East-West route is to be destroyed. Cambridgeshire is to build a guided 'busway between St. Ives (Cambs.) and Trumpington via Cambridge. This will destroy the Cambridge-Trumpington section of the former Bedford-Cambridge railway. (It will also destroy the disused Cambridge-St. Ives railway). The Department for Transport is paying £92.5m of the £116.2m construction cost. Bedford District Council has approved the building of a rowing lake at Willington.

This will cut a 120-metre gap across the former Cambridge-Bedford railway. Ruth Kelly has refused to call in Bedfordshire's planning approval for the lake.

Claims that a Cambridge-Bedford railway could be built on a new route are tenuous. Trumpington is a built-up area and the former railway is the only vacant route through it.

A 120-metre rail bridge at Willington would cost tens of millions. An alternative route via Letchworth would be longer and more expensive.

Forget Cambridge, Stansted and Felixtowe. Two Conservative councils and our New Labour government are mutilating East-West Rail before construction has even started.

Hugh Jaeger, Oxford