The idea of converting the Watford Junction to St Albans Abbey railway line to a guided busway was breathtakingly stupid when it was first proposed just over a year ago, and it is not one which has improved with keeping, for a number of reasons:

• The existing railway line is single-track only and to rebuild it as a twin-track guided busway would require massive and massively expensive civil engineering works.

• The only present busways in England – Luton to Dunstable and Cambridge to St Ives – ran highly over budget and over construction time and there is no reason to suppose that a Watford to St Albans project would not do so as well. The line would be out of use for many years during the rebuilding, during which time passengers would lose the habit of using it and upon completion it will prove to be a huge white elephant, because its former users will have migrated to alternative forms of transport, be they public or private.

• Claims are made of low usage of the Abbey Line. These can only be based on ticket sales which are at this low level because there is so rarely a conductor on the Abbey Flyer to sell tickets. It is usually possible to travel from Abbey station to Watford North without paying a penny in fares; if you are going all the way from Abbey to the Junction you simply tell the booking clerk at the Junction that you have travelled from Watford North!

• In 2013, the Department for Transport could not afford the conversion of the Abbey line from railway to light rail or tram operation – which was not a good idea, anyway – so from where is to be found the much higher cost of the latest proposal?

READ MORE: Direct rail link between St Albans and Watford could be ripped up and converted into busway.

I must repeat myself in saying that all the Abbey Line needs to make it into a really useful railway is the building of a passing loop at Bricket Wood, to enable the doubling of the frequency of trains – one train every forty-five minutes really isn’t good enough – and the introduction of a peak-hours through service to and from Euston.

Rodney Salter

Eastbury Road, Watford