A LITTLE GOES A LONG WAY

Thursday 26 Feb 2004

A LITTLE GOES A LONG WAY

Region & Route:: | Southern: Wessex; | Southern

Network Rail will be carrying out work on the track around Belvedere Road in Ipswich this weekend. The work forms part of the national Felixstowe to Nuneaton freight upgrade project, which includes work to increase the size of bridges and tunnels to accommodate taller freight containers. The project will see railway freight at the Port of Felixstowe thrive. The line from Westerfield to Felixstowe was originally designed for two sets of tracks, but only one was ever put into use. The work we are carrying out involves shifting the tracks into the centre of the bridge, meaning that the higher containers will have space to go through and the bridge will not have to be rebuilt. The work is scheduled to take around 27 hours, with engineers on site throughout. 300 yards in total will be moved late night Saturday, through Sunday and during the early hours of Monday morning. On Sunday 29 February, buses will replace trains between Ipswich and Felixstowe. Mark Livock, Network Rail Project Director said: “We are moving the track by almost a metre. This may not seem a lot, but it will make all the difference to the freight traffic running from Felixstowe, the UK’s largest container port to destinations around the country.”

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We own, operate and develop Britain's railway infrastructure; that's 20,000 miles of track, 30,000 bridges, tunnels and viaducts and the thousands of signals, level crossings and stations. We run 20 of the UK's largest stations while all the others, over 2,500, are run by the country's train operating companies.

Usually, there are almost five million journeys made in the UK and over 600 freight trains run on the network. People depend on Britain's railway for their daily commute, to visit friends and loved ones and to get them home safe every day. Our role is to deliver a safe and reliable railway, so we carefully manage and deliver thousands of projects every year that form part of the multi-billion pound Railway Upgrade Plan, to grow and expand the nation's railway network to respond to the tremendous growth and demand the railway has experienced - a doubling of passenger journeys over the past 20 years.

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