Travel between Oxford and Cambridge is a great example of how busted the UK transport network is outside big cities. They're about 80 miles apart, as the crow flies. By road, there's no decent east-west connections so it's a good 2 hour drive. By train, it's even worse - the shortest route is typically going to involve travelling into London, changing stations via tube, then heading back out on another line - probably a three hour train journey with two connections.

Reopening the Oxford/Cambridge trainline (and by extension Cambridge/Oxford/Reading) would be a huge boost to the development of the UK tech industry, connecting academic centers to tech hubs.