Boris Johnson has put up £500m for rail re-opening feasibilty studies: surely we can get some of it to look at Armagh-Portadown

I guess the folks who closed the bulk of our railways in the late 1950s never foresaw the crisis that would be created by the motor vehicles they claimed to be the future.

Fast forward 70 years and we seem to suffer from the same problem. Calls for more roads, wider roads, improved roads, all miss the point.

Instead of providing for more cars, busses, lorries, we should be providing the one mass transit system that would take vehicles off the road.

Northern Ireland’s railway network was decimated west of the Bann about 70 years ago and it is time to acknowledge, with the benefit of hindsight, that maybe this wasn’t so smart.

Imagine if we still had the Enniskillen, Clones, Monaghan, Armagh, Portadown, Belfast railway today, or the Portadown, Dungannon, Omagh, Strabane, Derry/Londonderry line.

Boris Johnson has made £500 million available for railway re-opening feasibilty studies; surely we can get some of that money to look at reopening the Armagh to Portadown line as a modest start!

It is time we adopted a longer term view.

Maybe they had the right idea when they referred to the railway as the ‘Permanent Way’.

Derek Smyth, Portadown Armagh Railway Society