A delivery driver calling at the house said he really chuckled at my Les Mis article and told me his wife wanted to see the show on stage in London.

“Are you going to take her?” I asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

'Train’s too slow.”

'Too slow?”

“Yeah, two hours sat in a railway carriage – way too long.”

Local farmers tell me the same thing. They’d be off to the West End every weekend if the train moved quicker.

“You can milk an entire herd in two hours,” one Macclesfield farmer told me. “Now, if it was that new high-speed train it’d be different. There in under an hour.”

“But it won’t stop in Macclesfield,” I explained. “Nearest station will be a 30-minute drive away  (60 on a Massey Ferguson).”

He said he didn’t care if it had no stops at all, whizzing across the country at 245mph really appealed to him.

A group of nurses told me the very same thing. Cut that journey time in half and they’d go to London for their weekly shop.

I did suggest that as the standard fare to London is currently £302, a trip on HS2 could set them back a grand but they didn’t care. Getting there quicker (from Crewe) was all that mattered.

As for slicing another huge swathe out of Cheshire’s greenbelt they were all for it. “Got way too much of it anyway, high-speed trains are what we need. I could live in Macc and work in St John’s Wood,” said one midwife.

I have to say HS2 is a stroke of genius. At a cost of only £32bn we can have trains that travel twice as fast but don’t stop. If you want to go to Manchester Airport on the new line you’ll have to travel to Crewe, (about the same distance as driving to Ringway).

You don’t suppose just halving the current fare structure would encourage a lot more people to travel to and from the capital do you? Nah, didn’t think so. If we can all afford current ticket prices I guess we can find an extra £700 apiece for HS2.

There isn’t any chance, is there, that after all the billions spent on this train the only ones travelling on the damn thing will be Eurocrats, MPs and those on expenses while the rest of us chuff along the old line?

Look what Concorde did to foster international travel. After billions spent on development they scrapped it.

HS2 is Concorde on rails.