Monday 16 Aug 2004

DELAYS PLUMMET BY 33% IN JULY AS RAIL PERFORMANCE IMPROVES FOR TENTH CONSECUTIVE MONTH

Region & Route:
| Southern
Passengers saw July’s train delays caused by Network Rail plummet by 33% compared to last year, bringing the tenth successive month of improvement in national train performance. The Southern Region, Network Rail Route Director, said: “ Network Rail delays fell nationally by almost 30% in July, making it ten straight months of sustained improvement.  It’s the passenger and freight users who benefit from this improvement but there is still much more to be done. “This continuing boost to train performance is the result of many changes we, and the train operators have made, including taking rail maintenance in-house. It’s attention to detail and hard daily graft by 30,000 dedicated employees, and those of our train operating colleagues, that made July’s progress possible. “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 Robin Gisby 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.”

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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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