Rail campaigners are hoping to foil the Government’s plans to spend £80 million to wreck the eight-mile long Luton-Dunstable railway which was still open to freight until the 1980s.

Despite the fiasco of the Cambridge-St Ives guided busway, the Government has agreed to allow Labour-controlled Luton Council to proceed with its plan to build a guided busway on the rail route.

Cynics say the Government’s £80 million handout to Luton is a desperate attempt to overshadow the sitting Luton South MP Margaret Moran’s suspension from the Labour party following the Channel 4 Dispatches TV programme last week.

However, although there is an apparent go-ahead for the busway, governments cannot approve contentious schemes so close to a general election. It has actually given Luton permission to spend small amounts of its own money in planning the busway.

The actual go-ahead could be in December 2010 when money is allocated for transport schemes by the Department for Transport.

This is one transport scheme that rail campaigners hope will be chopped as soon as possible. Labour could ditch it and the Tories are on record as saying they will.

In Luton, Councillor Roy Davies appears in a video promoting the bus project and dismisses the “small number of noisy objectors” and claims 73% support for the busway in a “consultation process”.

In fact, rail campaigners have consistently but politely presented awkward facts, including the existence of a plan to reopen the railway for less than £80 million.

They have also suggested the railway should be the centre of a light rail or tram-train network connecting Luton and Dunstable with the West Coast main line at Leighton Buzzard and the East Coast main line at Welwyn.

However, Luton Council has presided over a dramatic drop in bus ridership in recent years because they have failed to give buses priority on the roads of the former car-factory town.

Although cars are no longer made in Luton, the road lobby is still it seems in the ascendant there.

Luton Council has proved deaf to the rail case. Campaigners will have to keep raising the issue politely and sensibly in the letters pages of local papers and in appeals to the general election candidates.

Luton North MP Kelvin Hopkins is usually pro-rail and is supported by the train drivers union ASLEF. They should be exerting some pressure too.

Despite claims that the busway would serve the airport, BBC TV appears to show otherwise. They have obviously listened and twigged that it’s not quite the packet it's made out to be.

The potential of airport-bound passengers on the busway was supposed to give the scheme a cost-benefit of just marginally better than a ratio of 1:1. Take direct access to the airport out and the figures fall to a cost benefit of less than 1. This means the return on £1 is less than a £1!

Luton Green party has called for the busway to be scrapped and the old rail line used for a cheaper, more useful, more viable light rail link.

For the lowdown on the Cambridge’s misguided bus you can download a four-page article: Busway 789KB