A NEW START FOR RAIL PASSENGERS IN ANGLIA

Tuesday 31 Mar 2009

A NEW START FOR RAIL PASSENGERS IN ANGLIA

Region & Route:: Eastern: Anglia; | Eastern

Tomorrow marks the start of a new era for rail in Britain as Network Rail embarks on a £35bn programme of expenditure targeted at building a bigger and better railway. More than £1bn of this will be spent in the Anglia region.

The ambitious five year rail industry blueprint of investment includes plans for over 500 schemes and projects aimed at providing extra capacity or capability for passengers and freight customers with more seats, more trains, longer trains and faster trains.

The blueprint, called the CP4 Delivery Plan (CP4 is control period 4, 01 April 2009 to 31 March 2014) and its supporting documents runs to over 800 pages. It details the improvements to be made on the national rail system over the next five years, how train performance will increase to even higher record levels and how safety will also reach new highs.

Patrick Hallgate, route director said:" Britain is poised on the brink of a rail revolution. Tomorrow we embark upon one of the most exciting chapters in the history of our railways. Network Rail is ready to unleash the biggest expansion of Britain’s railways since the age of Brunel.

“The next five years will see massive investment in improving the railways for passengers and freight users by adding capacity and relieving overcrowding. We will see a transformed railway in Anglia through ambitious plans that will deliver more trains, more seats, longer trains and faster trains.

"Services will be even more reliable, delays caused by the infrastructure will be cut by nearly 25% and we will embark upon an investment programme that is bigger and more ambitious than anything seen in a generation.

"Delivering all this will require major change across the industry and we should not underestimate the scale and difficulties of the challenge that lies ahead."

Key projects in Anglia over the next five years include:

£1bn to renew track, signalling, bridges and telecoms systems
£125m to renew and upgrade overhead power lines on the Great Eastern Main Line between Liverpool Street and Chelmsford and Southend
Platform extensions to allow longer, 12-car trains from Liverpool Street to Stansted Airport and Cambridge including a new island platform at Cambridge (£30.7m)
Platform extensions to allow longer, 12-car trains from Fenchurch Street to Shoeburyness via Tilbury (£20.2m)
£67m to double passenger services on the North London Line ahead of the Olympic Games in 2012
Freight line improvements to get goods off the road and on to greener, cleaner rail
A passing loop at Beccles in Suffolk to enable hourly services between Ipswich and Lowestoft

In short this will mean more trains, faster trains and more efficient trains.

Of the £35bn to be spent on Britain's railways over the next five years almost £12bn will be invested on projects designed to relieve overcrowding by lengthening platforms and increasing capacity and capability to enable more trains to run. £11.5bn will be invested in replacing older parts of the network (rail, signalling, and bridges). A further £11.4bn will be spent on day-to-day maintenance and the costs of operating and running the network safely over the period.

Ian Coucher, Network Rail chief executive, said: "Stations will be transformed and new ones built. Speeds will be increased. Bottlenecks will be unblocked. Thousands of new trains will debut, services will run more frequently at weekends and at bank holidays. And all this while time keeping is ramped up, costs driven down and safety boosted.”

"The last five years has been about putting right the ills of the railway - this has been achieved with train punctuality, passenger satisfaction and railway safety all at record levels and billions cut from the cost of running the railway. The next five years will be focused on doing the basics even better and delivering a bigger, better railway for passengers and freight."

Notes to editors

National Stations Improvement Programme (NSIP) The NSIP programme is a joint industry initiative funded primarily by the DfT. The five year programme aims to deliver £165 million worth of station improvements to a minimum of 150 medium sized stations in England and Wales (excluding Network Rail managed stations) through CP4. Stations included under NSIP during CP4 in Anglia include: Barking East Tilbury Limehouse Ockendon Shoeburyness Upminster Chalkwell Thorpe Bay Billericay Bishops Stortford Brentwood Bush Hill Park Cambridge Colchester Forest Gate Gidea Park Harold Wood Ilford Rayleigh Romford Seven Sisters Shenfield Southend Victoria Waltham Cross Wickford Wood Street Access for All The DfT funded £370 million Access for All programme is aimed at creating accessibility improvements to over 200 stations in UK. Along the Anglia route, these include: Pitsea Audley End Gospel Oak Huntingdon Brentwood Ilford Chadwell Heath Laindon Finsbury Park Limehouse Highbury and Islington Tilbury Town Ipswich Tottenham Hale Planning for electrification There is cross party support for the electrification of Midland Mainline. Network Rail will be looking in more detail into how this work would be done. Other major projects across the UK include: Thameslink: The Thameslink programme is one of the biggest rail projects ever in the UK and currently Network Rail’s largest infrastructure project. The scheme will see massive benefits to passengers with much longer, more frequent services on the route. The £5.5bn + project (including over £1bn being spent by on new trains) will increase capacity through the heart of London by over 400%, taking the number of train carriages per hour from 64 to 288, or 3,500 seats per hour to 17,000. Delivered in two stages, the first, before London 2012, will see passengers on the northern section of the route main benefiting from 50% longer trains with dozens of stations upgraded and a new station constructed at Blackfriars. The second phase, for completion by 2015, will see the removal of key bottlenecks and a brand new station at London Bridge freeing up even greater capacity increases through the core central London route. Crossrail: Over £2bn on Crossrail – the largest civil engineering project in Europe with the huge redevelopment at Paddington. Taken with the Thameslink expansion there will be viable through-London north-south and east-west routes for the very first time King's Cross: Over £450m is being invested at king’s Cross station to completely redevelop the site which handles 47m passengers per year. By completion in 2013, the project will triple the size of the concourse area, providing more space and shops for people to use whilst waiting for trains; deliver a glass and aluminium concourse roof; improve access, including for disabled passengers, as well as link to underground, Thameslink, and domestic and international St Pancras services. An extra platform will also be added to increase the stations' train capacity. Reading: £425m at Reading untangling railway lines – leading to faster, more reliable train services. New tracks and platforms will be added to improve train speeds, reduce delays and ease overcrowding Scotland: • £300m+ on a new line from Airdrie to Bathgate, a new passenger railway that Network Rail is rebuilding after 50 years of closure. It will be a double track, electrified railway connecting communities in central Scotland to Scotland's two major cities, energising local economies and creating access to work, education and leisure opportunities. • £150m+ Glasgow Airport Rail Link, will provide a fast, reliable service between Glasgow Central station and Glasgow International Airport. The new nine mile link will call at Paisley Gilmour Street before reaching its final destination at a new purpose-built station at the airport

Contact information

Passengers / community members
Network Rail national helpline
03457 11 41 41

Latest travel advice
Please visit National Rail Enquiries

Journalists
Network Rail press office - South East route
020 3357 7969
southeastroutecomms@networkrail.co.uk

About Network Rail

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.