Madam,

I should like to respond to your article about the reopening of the Carmarthen to Aberystwyth railway line, following the outcome of the referendum (‘Railway line reopening plan may hit the buffers’).

While I fully accept Elin Jones AM’s observation that this will “make large projects such as this more challenging to realise in Wales”, I would stress that this is by no means the end of the Traws Link Cymru (TLC) campaign to reinstate the rail link.

As you noted in your report, a high-level consultation process, a WelTag (Welsh Transport Planning and Appraisal Guidance) assessment, is currently being conducted by ARCADIS, a national consultancy company specialising in transport, and this will report to the Cabinet Secretary (not ‘minister’ as you stated in your report) for Economy and Infrastructure by the end of August.

This follows the scoping study that was funded by the Welsh Government and which published its report in December of last year.

In addition, the profile of the campaign remains high, and TLC continues to attract cross-party and cross community backing, as well as the support of a range of institutions, including the county councils, community and town councils, the universities and the health board.

It is also worth bearing in mind that the recently-opened Borders Railway between Edinburgh and Tweedbank which, in many ways, has been a model for the TLC campaign, received no financial support from the EU but was funded entirely by the Scottish Government.

Equally, the newly opened Pyrenees railway (Oloron-Sainte-Marie to Bedous) in southern France was financed in its entirety by the Aquitaine Regional Council.

We now find ourselves in a highly volatile political situation.

In addition to the uncertainty about our role in Europe, we have a new Prime Minister, we have a Secretary of State for Wales who has been in office for less than six months, and we have a relatively new government in Cardiff Bay, with a new Cabinet Secretary for Economy and Infrastructure whose brief includes transport. In the middle of all this, a new Wales Bill is currently being prepared with further powers to be devolved to the Welsh Government.

There is a window of opportunity here for our Welsh Assembly and Westminster politicians to bring pressure to bear in order to ensure that a broader spectrum of powers, including rail infrastructure, be devolved to Wales.

This might involve additional financial support for major transport projects, such as the one for which TLC is campaigning.

If so, then the impending loss of potential European funding could be offset by government monies from Westminster and Cardiff, which could be sufficient to prevent the plan for the Carmarthen to Aberystwyth railway line from hitting the buffers.

Yours etc,

Name and address supplied.

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