When Rishi Sunak stood up in a disused railway station in Manchester to announce the cancellation of HS2 to Manchester, he created something of a problem.

One of the world’s most expensive railways is still being built, but will it be useful? The trains are too long for the platforms in Manchester, Birmingham will have too many platforms and Euston too few. Excess track capacity in the south will give way to insufficient in the north.

In summary, it’s a mess.

One person who thinks he knows how to fix the mess is Chris Gibb, who - amongst other jobs - used to run Virgin West Coast, the vary railway HS2 was designed to replicate.

On this week’s edition of The Freewheeling Podcast, we chat railways in general for a while and then get into the detail of - precisely - how we can make the best of what we’ve got.