THE CINDERELLA of the railways, the InterCity West Coast line, gets to go to the ball at last.

For, despite being the most intensively used route on the national network, it was last modernised 30 years ago.

Now the line is promised a £1.5billion upgrade and £600million of new rolling stock - including 125mph tilting trains - that will cut journey times from London to Glasgow by 40 minutes.

This is great news for the North West.

Nonetheless, the announcement deserves a touch of cynicism.

The modernisation should have begun years ago, but was held back by government bias towards road transport.

Now the controversial privatisation of the railways needs a success.

Is this boost for the long-neglected line a sweetener, then, to ensure that a franchise for the West Coast line is in the bag before the general election?

And is not the huge government subsidies the successful bidder will receive to support services on the line to ensure it is profitable enough to pay for the new trains not another?

But if the apparent marriage of actual necessity with political necessity is one rum aspect of this bonus for the North West's rail-users and its economy, another is the catching-up job that Britain is now doing on the use of tilting trains that go faster round bends.

BR's original version, the Advanced Passenger Train, was junked in the 1980s because of technological problems.

Yet many involved on the project believe that, with more commitment from the top, they could have been solved and the train put into full service a whole decade ago.

Now tilting trains are running successfully all over the continent.

But it is the Italians who are the most successful at making and selling them and not us.

In two instances, then, this overdue boost for the West Coast line shows how British enterprise, stifled as it is, takes a long time getting there.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.