SUPER-FAST express trains between parts of Kent and London - promised when the Channel Tunnel Rail Link was being planned - have been scrapped by the Strategic Rail Authority.

The Kent Coast and the Medway Valley lines will be excluded from the new rail network when 140-mph CTRL domestic expresses start running under the latest plans by the government's rail body.

An SRA spokesman told a joint meeting of Kent and Medway councillors in Maidstone that Rochester junction and rail bridge are already over their designed capacity.

And even if the new generation electric trains could run they would not be able to make it pay. Instead, only trains between Gravesend and London could be justified on financial grounds, the two councils have been told.

But one Medway councillor at the meeting, Labour's Derek Munton, described as "fanciful" a suggestion that the Gravesend trains would be a success because they could be extended through to the proposed Cliffe airport. "That's reading too much into the situation," he said.

However, the airport planners say the service from Cliffe to St Pancras would take 23 minutes if the new CTRL domestic trains were introduced from the airport.

Councillors of all parties have been horrified by the news. The chairman of the joint select committee, Kent Cllr Linda Cufley (Lib Dem), said that the SRA was not taking account of potential regeneration benefits. "It is important to hear all the evidence from the witnesses before the select committee," she said.

"There will have to be a lot of lobbying, particularly on the regeneration issues in Thames Gateway and East Kent, to persuade the government they have to be considered. This is an opportunity we won't get again - to look at the rail system across the whole of Kent."