As a working volunteer on the West Somerset Railway for over 20 years and a well known local resident/businessman for many more years than that, I have followed all the correspondence concerning the proposed future development and current problems of the railway with a growing sense of despair and annoyance – despair at the level of ignorance and condescension displayed in the letters last week from Messrs Mendoza, Webber and Scott.

The hundreds of hard working volunteers (unpaid remember) will take exception to being called railway buffs, “obsessed with all things Victorian”; that the railway exists at all is due to them and has been so for the last 40 years without any support from the armchair snipers who quite obviously don’ t even begin to understand what the WSR actually is.

The WSR runs as a tourist attraction giving enormous pleasure to hundreds of thousands of visitors and contributing millions of pounds to the local economy, NOT as a commuter railway which would require eye-watering amounts of investment to run at all, and then at a loss, as the number of commuters needed to show a profit will remain in their nice warm/air-conditioned cars from door to door. And remember, those unpaid volunteers and inefficient steam engines will have disappeared.

The then British Railways Board closed the line because it was uneconomical in 1971, so why at the behest of those people from cloud cuckoo land would it be economical today?

Those of us living in the real world know that without a major change of government policy and millions of pounds being invested in the line, those well meaning but deluded commuter supporters don’t stand a cat in hell’s chance of ever seeing the railway they seek.

The shuttle service from Taunton to Bishops Lydeard is a way forward if it has sustained support from fare-paying passengers but, sadly, I for one am not holding my breath.

Other well-informed railway contributors have had letters published accurately explaining all the pitfalls surrounding the operation of a commercial, all-year railway service; obviously they were not read by the aforementioned, or not believed or understood!

The present financial crisis is directly the result of bad management over the last ten years or so, the new chairman of the new board is having to sort out the mess, and what they are choosing to reveal to us is what has been discovered so far, and commercial and legal restrains have to be observed no matter how curious we all are.

It is worth being reminded that the WSR was winning awards from tourist and railway organisations and had massive financial reserves when the previous general manager retired.

We should all just stand back for a while and give the medicine time to work.

I travelled on the second shuttle to leave Bishops Lydeard last Saturday and overheard someone being interviewed by the media and enthusing about the “potential” of the railway and the possibility of taking goods as well as passengers, thus saving all the HGVs on the local roads. I nearly burst out laughing at the idea of that proposal.

One of your contributors stated that he would be prepared to invest in the WSR to achieve his and other end. Well gentlemen, the elephant in the room will need millions of pounds to satisfy your wish list and even then you may find yourselves buried in a pile of what elephants do in bulk!

I firmly believe that the railway will survive primarily as a tourist attraction with a shuttle connection to Taunton for those willing to make a no-car journey for pleasure where time is not important.

John Stenner, Porlock.