Track triumph

It’s a straightforward piece of good news that the Elizabeth line, the 100km-long railway that runs from Essex through central London to Berkshire, is attracting more than 3 million passengers a week, compared with the expected 2 million. It now accounts for one in six rail passenger journeys in the entire country. No one truly knows, with grand infrastructure projects such as this, whether they will meet a real demand, so overuse is a welcome problem. Perhaps there’s hope yet for the even grander HS2, which currently looks like a very expensive way to

get from the out-of-the-way Old Oak Common in London to the not-so-central Curzon Street in Birmingham.