Improving Plymouth’s rail connectivity is vital for the region argues Neill Mitchell.

Plymouth today is "A City with Ambition" and its strategic growth is enhancing the wider economic performance, wealth creation and employment prospects of Devon and Cornwall.

Whilst it has long been the largest conurbation in the peninsula, the city's character has been transformed in the last decade. It has emerged from a brow-beaten subservience to low-wage manufacturing and grant dependency culture, to a new era as a vibrant university city, green and clean, a centre of excellence for medical research and innovation, marine and nuclear engineering, creative, leisure and lifestyle industries. The defeatism and lethargy of the past has given way to aspiration, overseas corporate control has been replaced by local initiative and institutional employment increasingly by entrepreneurship.

The Plymothians of the 2010s are energetic go-getters, whose drive is benefiting us all as they strive to sharpen the overall competitiveness of the South West and engender a positively cool image for potential domestic and international investors alike.

But, these "go-getters" need to be able to do just that, i.e. go out into the global marketplace and get new business. And, indeed, they also need customers to feel equally inclined to come inward to the region, without undue hassle. Securing such ease of connectivity is the next challenge and, inevitably, following closure of the city's airport in December the focus has now to be upon rail. Especially so as the Great Western Franchise will soon be re-let for the 15 years 2013-2028.

No longer "last past the post" in responding to government consultations, Plymouth City Council has been keeping ahead of the game in preparing for the Department for Transport's Consultation upon the Replacement of the Great Western Rail Franchise, which closes on March 31. Months before the document was released, the city council's officers had already set about engaging nationally-recognised rail consultants to assist in the formulation of a realistic and affordable set of options to present to the DfT.

This early work progressed to the formation of a task force, hardwiring the council in with the university, the Chamber of Commerce and the city's politicians on a cross-party basis. This group was able to apply clear thinking to the preparation of a strategy document, published under the no-nonsense title "Plymouth: The case for better rail services" (see www.plymouth.gov.uk/policyandplanning ).

The largely service-level proposals in this document are relatively modest and decidedly low-cost (projected £10 million, with an estimated payback of £94 million a year to the economy) compared with the disproportionately vast rail infrastructure investments earmarked for other parts of the UK. The latter include the £15 billion London Crossrail project, £22 billion HS2 high speed line from Euston to Birmingham and the North, the £8 billion electrification of the London to Bristol & SouthWales main line and so on. Yet, the Plymouth plan would iron out many anomalies which presently constrain the city's rail connectivity – not least the lack of down trains from London before late morning. The plan also focuses upon the need to accelerate intercity services, providing the shared "2-3-5" target of 2 hours journey time between Paddington and Exeter, 3 hours for Plymouth and 5 hours for Penzance.

Unlike air transport, railways are not corridors which simply link one destination to another, rather they jointly serve huge geographical areas – especially so in Devon & Cornwall where we, today, have only the one Great Western main line operating west of Exeter. Thus, although Plymouth has a core population of 250,000 and sustains the wealth of a large surrounding economic catchment, under a total umbrella of some 400,000 (equal to the population of Cornwall), the upgrading of its rail services has the potential to deliver substantive spin-off benefits all the way to Penzance.

It was past initiative and venture capital of the merchants of Plymouth, meeting in its Guildhall in 1834, that first prompted the building of Plymouth, Devonport & Exeter Railway through South Devon (later GWR). It was the importance of the city's port which drove further rail investment during the 20th century and, largely, the regional economic importance of the city which saved the peninsula from the catastrophic loss of its entire rail network – as advocated in the Serpell Report upon Railway Finances of 1983.

So, Plymouth is once more championing the case for better rail services – for itself as Devon and Cornwall's principal city, for its economic catchment and for the overall 'connectivity benefit' of both counties. Let's hope the rationale and merits of the case which the city is advocating for the new franchise find favour within Whitehall, not just at the Department for Transport but – arguably more pertinently – also with the Department for Business.