We'd rather have the TGV Mediterranee please.

Telegrammed by Ithuriel
Today's announcement by Network Rail of £2.3bn worth of Crossrail work includes:

• Electrifying the western route from London to Maidenhead
• Rebuilding and improving stations on the route including Paddington, Abbey Wood, Ilford, Romford and Ealing Broadway
• Major junction and train reliability improvements

At Reading, the £400m+ scheme will dramatically improve the station and the reliability and punctuality of services accessing and passing through the station by:

• Removing the current bottleneck by constructing a new railway viaduct west of the station thus improving the reliability and punctuality
• Doubling the number of platforms and building a new passenger footbridge and northern entrance to the station

How on earth does this series of minor works add up to £2.3 billion?

It only cost the French £3 billion to build TGV Mediterranee.

UPDATE: This just in from Network Rail...

Can we have a little less of an inferiority complex (we're being very Freudian today) when comparing our railway to continental European ones?

Without getting into the predictable debate about high speed and costs etc..., ponder upon this:

• Everyday on the rail network in Britain we run 50% more trains then they do in France - a country with a similar population and an area around two-and-half times ours.

• Also fewer trains run in Switzerland every day than we run in Kent.

We do some things better here, though you wouldn't believe it if you only listened to the nattering nabobs of negativism - as Spiro Agnew would say.

Not that I'd ever want use Nixonian parallels when talking about Network Rail's communication strategies...