Both the Report and the Appendix make interesting reading. It will be interesting to see what transpires over the 10/20 years. Time for some proper infrastructure projects to happen in the SW when compared to the rest of the country.
Only skimmed it, but indeed, it seems that they've been quite canny to be, 1) very conciliatory, 2) not ask for an awful lot of money (compared with say, Welsh electrification), 3) working with the existing planning framework and tied it in with existing projects and work that's going on further east (well thought out, not rocking the boat), 4) dropped in a reference or two to Crossrail 2 (i.e. you can afford that, surely you can spare us the equivalent of CR2's stationery budget), and 5) point out that having reliable rail links to London might be quite important militarily if the Scottish devolved and the whole fleet had to decamp to Plymouth.
If you compare it to the Welsh Assembly that seems to have spent the last 5 years writing a rail strategy seemingly without any real idea of who would pay for it, whether Westminster would devolve the necessary powers and indeed whether much of it would be heavy or light rail, then it starts to look very sensible and hard to refuse.
