According to Agility Trains, the £4.5 billion package covers the supply of 596 carriages. The Railway Gazette report refers to an "overall package", with "financial close" covering the supply of 369 vehicles, and "commercial close" for a further 227 vehicles for the ECML. So presumably the £4.5 billion is for 596 vehicles, but this is not exactly clear.
I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.
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Search for "Hitachi secures largest UK train order" Mark Odell and Jim Pickard, financial times or try http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b949d9c8-d4f2-11e1-9444-00144feabdc0.html#axzz22U6iUxjJ
This roughly matches the £2.1bn financing recently got by Hitachi from various japanese banks eg see http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-25/hitachi-s-u-k-train-venture-said-to-plan-2-1-billion-pound-loan.html "Hitachi’s U.K. Train Venture Said To Plan 2.1 Billion Pound Loan"