The long grass of CP5

There was not much news, and certainly none good, at the Railfuture meeting in Bridgend yesterday. The Hendy report had been published, confirming that the extension of electrification from Cardiff through Bridgend, Port Talbot and Neath to Swansea would not begin before 2019. Indeed, the story outside the official meeting that neither the civil servants at the Department for Transport and the Treasury nor Network Rail had taken the coalition's decision seriously. Apart from Hitachi's fancy new sheds in Swansea, with attendant power gantries, there has been no preparatory work west of Cardiff. So there has been no realistic estimate of what work needs to be carried out on existing bridges and other infrastructure - except that it is known that the clearance of the last lot of signal gantries to be installed is inadequate.