Media centre

Monday 16 Aug 2004

DELAYS PLUMMET BY 17% IN JULY AS RAIL PERFORMANCE IMPROVES FOR TENTH CONSECUTIVE MONTH

Region & Route:

| Southern

Passengers in East Anglia saw train delays caused by Network Rail plummet by 17% in July compared to the same month last year, bringing the tenth successive month of improvement in national train performance. Newly published figures show that delays on the Great Eastern route between London and Sheringham (including branch lines) fell by 16% to 37,930 minutes in July, while delays on the West Anglia route between London and Kings Lynn (including branch lines) fell by 17% to 46,825. Jon Wiseman, Network Rail Route Director, said: “Network Rail delays fell nationally by almost 30% in July, marking ten straight months of sustained improvement.  It is the passenger and freight users who benefit from this improvement, but there is still much more to be done. “The continuing boost to train performance is the result of many changes we and the train operators have made, including taking rail maintenance in-house.  This progress has been made possible by the attention to detail and hard daily graft of 30,000 dedicated Network Rail employees, and those of our train operating colleagues. “Passengers and freight customers rightly demand more.  We are anything but complacent as we work with our industry partners to deliver a better performing railway each hour of every day.” - more - Plummet – 2 Some of the initiatives that are helping to improve daily punctuality include: ·            Rolling out new integrated control centres where a ‘fat controller’ makes key decisions to ensure services run as smoothly and punctually as possible ·            Working much more closely with train operators at a very local level to understand and tackle performance issues ·            The creation of a seasonal taskforce to help us prepare for whatever Mother Nature has in store Mr Wiseman concluded: “Our work to rebuild Britain’s railway continues but we can now see that the changes we have made over the past 20 months are starting to pay real dividends.”