Media centre

Tuesday 27 May 2008

£45m SPRING BANK HOLIDAY RAIL WORK COMPLETED

Region & Route:

National

Train services across the country returned to normal today after extensive improvement work was carried out by Network Rail over the spring bank holiday weekend. Scheduled work continues on parts of the West Coast Main Line.

During the three days over 4,000 people worked to deliver £45million worth of work to improve passengers’ journeys. The biggest projects included:

• Further work to upgrade the West Coast mainline, enabling millions more people to use the railway each year and leading to a journey time reduction of 56 minutes from London to Glasgow
• Platform extensions at Luton Airport Parkway, helping create more and faster journeys to London as part of the £5.5bn Thameslink Programme
• Track and signalling works at Merthyr and Newport, improving journeys for people across Wales and South West England
• Ongoing infrastructure improvement work at Hull Docks enabling 20 extra freight trains to serve Humber Ports daily – taking up to 1,000 lorries off the roads every day

Network Rail Director of Infrastructure Investment, Simon Kirby said: “I’d like to once again thank passengers for their patience whilst we carried out these essential works. This weekend saw yet again a tremendous amount of work completed across the country to improve the railway for passengers and freight users and we are continuing to do more.”