Wednesday 3 Apr 2024
£4.8bn, five-year investment plan for Scotland’s Railway gets underway
- Region & Route:
- Scotland’s Railway: Scotland
Network Rail has today (Wednesday, April 3) announced the start of its five-year investment plan to deliver a safe, green, reliable railway for Scotland’s passengers, freight customers and taxpayers.
Between April 2024 and March 2029, £4.8bn will be invested across the country to improve punctuality, reduce delays and make Scotland’s Railway more resilient in the face of our changing weather.
The plan announced today includes:
- Over £2bn of investment in renewing key infrastructure
- Over £1bn of investment in maintaining Scotland’s Railway
- Increased investment in drainage systems and more drainage engineers
- Continued investment in new technology to help monitor the impact of extreme weather
- Installation of more remote monitoring equipment to give early warning of potential issues
- Dedicated plans for taking climate action and reducing the railway’s carbon footprint
- Ambitious plans to reduce costs across Scotland’s Railway by adopting new ways of working.
Alex Hynes, managing director of Scotland’s Railway, said: “The plan we have announced today will help us deliver a safe and reliable railway for our customers and one which supports the social and economic growth of the communities we serve.
“Over the next five years we will continue to invest in renewing and maintaining our infrastructure while also making it more resilient to Scotland’s changing weather.
“We will also work closely with our industry partners and government to ensure we deliver a value for money railway for the taxpayers who fund us while improving the service we offer to passengers and freight customers.”
Network Rail is funded in five-year cycles, called control periods, with the current one, CP7, running from 1 April 2024 to 31 March 2029.
The funding and activity to be delivered is agreed in a long and complex three-year process working closely with the Office of Rail and Road, the Department for Transport and Transport Scotland.
Across Britain, Network Rail will invest a total of £45.4bn over the course of Control Period 7.
The Control Period 7 delivery plan sets out how money will be spent on operations, maintenance and renewals – enhancement projects are funded separately.
More information can be found at: https://www.networkrail.co.uk/who-we-are/publications-and-resources/our-delivery-plans-for-2024-2029/
Contact information
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Network Rail press office - Nick King
Media relations manager (Scotland)
0141 555 4108 / 07515 617073
nick.king3@networkrail.co.uk
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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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