KEN Livingstone's charging plans for London aim to reduce commuter cars into London by 25 per cent. Those commuters will have to go by train.

The managing director of Chiltern Railways has already announced plans for longer and more frequent trains just to meet current demand.

These will have to be radically boosted to take the thousands of commuters who will be diverted from their current daily drive to London.

Indeed, at peak hours, the Chiltern lines will be saturated, with no spare capacity for freight.

We need only look to Germany to see what will happen next.

The main German railway lines are saturated. The Germans find that each lorry they take off a train frees up, on average, ten passenger spaces, each of which would have otherwise used a car.

They prefer to see one lorry on a motorway rather than ten cars.

So lorries are being put back onto the motorway to free up passenger traffic on the railways.

We don't need to have to reinvent this wearisome wheel.

Let us go straight away to saturating the railway with people and leaving lorries on the motorways.

Cllr M C Dunlop OBE

Gregories Road

Beaconsfield