A SHOWDOWN meeting of road, rail and canal chiefs is being called by MP Michael Ancram in a bid to avoid further tragedies at the notorious Burbage Wharf bridges.

Mr Ancram admitted to the Gazette that he is haunted by the spectre of a lorry, or worse still a coach full of passengers, plunging over the bridges on to the high speed rail track.

The bridges over the Penzance-Paddington railway line and Kennet and Avon Canal have already claimed one life.

In June 1997 music teacher Richard Exon, 23, died when his car failed to negotiate the bends over the bridges.

His Volvo car plunged through a gap between the bridges and landed on top of a train carrying thousands of tons of stone.

The car slipped down between the wagons and Mr Exon was killed.

There have been numerous near misses with vehicles actually crashing through the bridge parapets on to the railway line where train speeds top 100mph.

On one occasion a train, fortuitously a slow goods train, struck big lumps of masonry that a car had dislodged on to the track. The front of the engine was damaged but it was not derailed.

In August last year four young people had a miraculous escape after their Volkswagen Golf plunged through a gap between the canal and rail bridges after demolishing a crash barrier.

Their car ended up straddling the railway lines but trains on the line had been suspended due to weekend engineering work.

Burbage councillors had been hoping that an end was in sight to their battle of more than 30 years for a new single bridge to replace the pair of rail and canal bridges.

However chairman John Powell said this week that their hopes had been dashed by a letter from Wiltshire County Council's director of environmental services, George Batten.

In his letter to the parish council Mr Batten said the estimate of the cost of replacing the skew bridges had risen to £3 million.

Mr Batten whose late father, also George, was county highways surveyor in the early days of the Burbage Wharf bridges campaign said Wiltshire County Council was unable to fund the scheme from its reserves and depended on central government allocation for capital projects. His letter said: "The indications from central government suggest that adequate funding is unlikely to be forthcoming for the foreseeable future for schemes such as this."

The environmental services director said a meeting would be taking place with Mr Ancram, Network Rail and British Waterways in November and added; "I would not wish to raise expectations but you can rest assured the problems at Burbage Wharf are being considered at a high level."

Coun Powell said the Wharf Bridges were originally included in the village bypass scheme but when the new road was built 12 years ago the bridges were omitted to save money.

Mr Ancram said he hoped that by getting the highways authority, Network Rail and BWB all together at a meeting in November an action plan could be thrashed out. He said he fears a major disaster at the bridge .