The information to justify a busway on the Cambridge-St Ives rail line is flawed.

The dirty tricks of the Beeching era were recalled this week during the inquiry into plans for a busway on the Cambridge-St Ives rail line.

British Rail regularly presented distorted finance and usage figures when it wanted to close branch lines in the 1960s.

Now Cambridgeshire County Council is using similar tricks to justify ripping up a rail line.

Dr Stephen Ades said that a Ferrari would be hard-pressed to achieve rates of acceleration demanded of the guided bus, which would "accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in 5.5 seconds" and braking that was more severe than gravity.

Dr Ades, representing CAST.IRON, said Cambridgeshire County Council's experts should have corrected figures that were clearly wrong. However they used these figures to predict optimistic journey times.

He invited the Inspector, Dr Chris Gossop, to wonder whether, in the light of such elementary errors, there were not other farcical claims in the council's case.

An objector to the scheme, Steve Hannath, accused the county council of being in contempt of the public inquiry into its proposed guided bus scheme. He said that by releasing £3million to prepare for the scheme the council was "dismissing" the inquiry as a foregone conclusion and told the inspector that the county council had "impugned your independence and integrity".

Arthur Henderson, who developed the guided bus concept 40 years ago slammed the guided bus proposal as "system-led, when it should be demand-led" and told the inspector: "We should be planning for up to 50 years ahead - and for both freight and people."