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The world's most recognised railway bridge, the Forth Bridge, will become publicly accessible for the first time by 2015 under plans revealed by Network Rail today.

After five weeks of around-the-clock effort, six miles of new track, 143 new signals, a new platform, the work of 2,000 people and over 30,000 bus movements, a full train service has begun again at Nottingham station.

The latest project to upgrade and modernise the railways of Wales and the border counties of England is now underway with a £10.5m investment to improve the railway between Wrexham and Shrewsbury.

Punctuality on the railways reached 91.3% during Period 5, according to monthly performance data released today by Network Rail.

Rail staff and community volunteers are out in force this week to spruce-up the surroundings of the developing station at Energlyn and Churchill Park in Caerphilly.

Sir Bernard Zissman, Chairman of the original judging panel responsible for selecting the winning design for Birmingham New Street station’s refurbishment has visited the completed first phase of the station transformation and had a sneak preview of what is still to come for this exciting project.

· Proposals targeting 15% capacity increase by 2019
· Work starts to procure more than 135 extra carriages for suburban routes
· Infrastructure investment to help drive reliability improvements

Network Rail and its partners have begun work to create a prototype battery-powered train, part of an industry study into the feasibility of using electric trains on parts of the network which have not been electrified.