'Rail in Wales has been a woeful tale. No more fanfare it's now time to deliver'

Political editor Ruth Mosalski casts her eye over tonight' major announcement and asks what do the big numbers actually mean and when will the new stations be built

Promises are being made about rail in Wales - again

There will be lots of talk and fanfare about rail in Wales today. You'll hear numbers like "12,000 jobs" and £14 billion. Politicians will stand and tell you they have good news and this is "once in a generation". The quotes that have been released, the numbers being touted are all big, impressive and full of adjectives.

But as is ever the case for these big announcements, they are also just numbers, just words, just promises, especially if you're someone sat on a railway station platform waiting for a service to arrive or in one of the many places in Wales that doesn't benefit from rail connections.

If you're someone who has followed the HS2 saga, the decades of underfunding on rail in Wales, then you're right to raise an eyebrow when you, again, hear someone declare there is another strategy about rail in Wales.

This announcement is coming just weeks out from an election where Labour in Wales faces, the polls say, an electoral hammering.

The party needs to produce a rabbit out of a hat, a heck of a rabbit if it tries to avoid electoral defeat, and it has needed something of an epic scale. There is plenty of excitement in political........

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