SIR – I have been lucky enough to collect some wonderful bound volumes of the Evening News & Times from years ago and it has been fascinating to look through the old photographs and news stories of our city from the late 1940s to the late 1960s.

In particular, I have been on the look out for anything connected to our local railways. Our society hold an annual railwaymen’s reunion for the Worcestershire area, each October and I have been thrilled to find amongst a 1949 edition, a photograph of the retirement of four railway goods Shire horses at Shrub Hill, with their handlers. We still have ex railwaymen who attend the reunion who can still remember them (one a 96-year-old) so it will be a joy to share.

Also found, have been various photographs of Railwaymen presentations for first aid, retirements and appointments. In 1964 the Worcester branch of the staff association opened their new club in Tolladine Road, which your newspaper covered in the written word and with a photograph. In 1961 a ‘Ghost train’ was discovered at Droitwich after a person or persons unknown took a pannier tank engine off shed at Wolverhampton and got as far as Droitwich, until a signalman became suspicious and alerted the authorities.

Many happy memories. I thank you for making these bound volumes available in such a truly generous way.

Chris Wilkinson

Worcester Locomotive Society,

St John’s, Worcester

Budget was unfair mess

SIR – It seems to have escaped the notice of Gren Gaskell (March 25) that the Budget on which Harriet Baldwin worked was an unfair, miscalculated mess which rapidly fell apart, and prompted the resignation of Ian Duncan Smith.

Maybe that’s OK with Gaskell since it ‘delivered what Conservative voters voted for’. By that he presumably means a massive handout to the top 10 per cent most wealthy households at the expense of continued austerity and further proposed cuts for the poor and disabled.

The Chancellor also announced the Tories’ latest privatisation wheeze, the enforced ‘academisation’ of all our schools, which even provoked an outcry from sensible Tory local government leaders.

But as the last great one-nation Tory leader, Harold Macmillan, lamented before his death, the post-Thatcher Tory party has long been intent on “selling off the family silver”: they can see no public asset or service from which the market cannot make a fast buck.

In the run-up to last year’s election, Mrs Baldwin told the Gazette that the proposed renationalisation of our railways was “a wacky far-left socialist idea”; she was apparently oblivious of the fact that polls show a majority of British voters supporting that sensible policy.

I met Mrs Baldwin then in my street and asked her how her party would replace housing association homes to be sold off under her party’s new extended Right to Buy policy; she gave me no answer but instead contemptuously derided the suggestion that we need much more social housing, not less.

Gren Gaskell no doubt delights in an obsolete political system which gives his now extreme ideologically – driven party the right to lord it over the rest of us on the back of the votes of 24 per cent of the electorate.

But this ex-investment banker and her supporters do not represent people like me, and it seems ironic that she poses smiling every week in your columns with good local people, whilst her Government drives hundreds of Malvern households to use the local foodbank.

Steve Smart

Malvern

Freedom to have opinion

SIR – In reply to Gerry Taggert’s letter (April 5). Gerry  do you actually read what drivel you write? You are a threat to democracy.

You think you can decide who can and who can’t have free speech. What part of history do you belong to Gerry?

If I stood up for the Red Indians, or indigenous Aboriginals that would be acceptable by you Gerry? But speaking of indigenous British people is deemed racist according to you.

So you can add being a hypocrite and opposing free speech to your dazzling CV, Gerry.  

Carl Mason

British Resistance Party, Worcester

Bus service is no service

SIR, I completely agree with Mr Pegler on his comments about the number 44 bus service to Malvern – it is a joke.

I waited for over half an hour for a 44 bus in Worcester watching all the other services come and go several times.

So much for saying there is a bus to Malvern every ten minutes.

Please try and sort it out, or there will be more cars on the road from Malvern to Worcester.

JASPER FARR

Worcester

Glad that Trump lost

SIR, I am delighted that Republican Ted Cruz has won the Winconsin Primary over Donald Trump.

GEORGE COWLEY

Worcester