Millions to benefit from massive multi-billion pound railway investment programme

Monday 31 Mar 2014

Millions to benefit from massive multi-billion pound railway investment programme

Region & Route:: National

Millions of people across the country are set to benefit from an ambitious five-year £38bn spending and investment programme – part of the biggest sustained investment programme ever – that will transform today's railway giving passengers more trains, more seats, reduced congestion and bigger, better stations.

The five-year plan will see the busiest parts of Britain’s rail network targeted making a very real difference to millions of people's lives and providing a significant boost to the economy.

Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin said: “A key part of this government's long term economic plan is investing in world class infrastructure. That is why we are putting record amounts of government funding into our railways over the next five years. That investment will generate growth, create jobs and boost business while delivering faster journeys, greater comfort and better punctuality for passengers across the UK.”

Mark Carne, chief executive of Network Rail, said: “Millions of passengers and freight users will benefit enormously from the plans we set out today to wisely spend and invest £38bn in transforming some of the busiest parts of our railway network.”

The people of Devon and Cornwall also heard some good news today as Network Rail confirmed that their railway will be reconnected to Britain’s network on 4 April following two months of tremendous efforts by hundreds of railway engineers in, and around, Dawlish. A massive landslip, involving the collapse of 20,000 tonnes of cliff-face near Teignmouth on 4 March, had threatened the planned opening.

"Dawlish has shown us at our best when we work in a planned, disciplined and innovative way. Our aim is to emulate that approach and embed it in our organisation so that we are continuously improving the service for our customers.”

Today, more than 1.5bn passenger journeys are made by rail each year and by 2019 the railway will be carrying more people than at any time in its history. The rail industry's five-year plan will:

Provide capacity for 170,000 extra seats for commuters at peak time
Shorten journeys and provide for hundreds more daily services between the cities of the north (Northern Hub)
Electrify more than 850 miles of railway and see whole new fleets of electric trains
Transform hundreds of stations around the country including London Bridge, Manchester Victoria, Birmingham New Street and Glasgow Queen Street

Improving passenger, public and workforce safety will also feature prominently throughout control period 5 (2014-19) with plans to close a further 500 level crossings on top of the almost 800 closed since 2010, reducing risk by a further 25%.

Mr Carne commented: “Passenger, public and workforce safety will be at the core of our plans. Good safety performance and good train and business performance go hand-in-hand and in both, we must strive for, and deliver, continuous improvement day by day.”

As well as the big projects, the day-to-day task of delivering a safe and reliable railway will be even more important and tough to deliver as more services and more improvement work becomes ever more challenging to balance. Investment in this area includes:

Renewing over 7,000km of track – enough to reach from London to Mumbai
75 football pitches worth of station platforms replaced (300,000m²)
Improving train punctuality to 92.5% across the country - the best performing in Europe
Cutting the cost of running the British railway network by 20% making it one of the most efficient in Europe
Investing in new technology and equipment that will deliver step-changes in productivity and efficiency

Mr Carne concluded: "Britain’s railways are a vital part of our national infrastructure. They connect homes and workplaces, businesses with markets, they create jobs, stimulate trade and support the growth of a balanced economy.

“We are good at delivering projects both great and small and at providing a safe and reliable railway but want to do even more for the people that rely on our railway network. This investment responds to the growth and demands being placed upon us by delivering bigger, better stations, more trains and seats, reopened railway lines and fewer level crossings. We all want an improving, safer, successful and better value railway for everyone, and that is what we will do."

Notes to editors

For more information, visit www.betterrailway.co.uk

Control period 5 runs from 1 April 2014 to 31 March 2019. Over this period, Network Rail and its industry partners will deliver a programme of investment to tackle the severe problem of congestion on the busiest parts of the network, providing capacity for 170,000 extra commuter seats at peak times including capability to run hundreds more trains a day between the key cities of the north of England and a 20% increase in central London’s commuter rail capacity through completion of the Crossrail and Thameslink projects.

Of the £38bn to be spent on Britain’s railways over the next five years, £13bn will be invested in capital expenditure projects to relieve overcrowding by building new tracks, uncorking bottlenecks, increasing capacity and upgrading outdated stations:

The Northern Hub programme will deliver a step-change in connectivity across the north of England, providing faster journeys and the capacity to run hundreds more trains per day between key northern cities.
The Thameslink programme will be completed, with 24 trains per hour each way through the centre of London, taking much needed pressure off the Tube network and relieving commuters of the aggravation of changing trains during the busiest part of the day. Crossrail trains will also be running, increasing capacity for travel through the capital by a further 10%.
More than 850 miles of railway will be electrified, including the Great Western Main Line from Maidenhead to Swansea, the Midland Main Line from Sheffield to Bedford and across the north and north west of England, bringing greener, more frequent and more reliable journeys for millions of people.
A new, electrified railway linking the Great Western, West Coast and Midland Main Lines will connect Oxford with Bedford and Milton Keynes as part of the East West Rail project.
More than 30 miles of new railway and seven new stations will reconnect the border towns of Scotland with Edinburgh for the first time in 50 years, reversing a Beeching closure of the 1960s and providing a faster, greener alternative to travelling by road.
Stations including Birmingham New Street, Manchester Victoria, Glasgow Queen Street and London Bridge will be transformed, as King's Cross has been, restoring former Victorian glory alongside modern facilities and retail opportunities, bringing investment and jobs into our cities and further income for the railway to invest.

In addition to this capital expenditure, £12bn will be invested in replacing and renewing older parts of the network. More than 7,000km of track and nearly 6,000 sets of points will be renewed or refurbished and 7,000km of fencing and almost 300,000m² of platforms at stations will be replaced or renewed. A further £13bn will be spent on day-to-day maintenance and the costs of operating and running one of the busiest, most intensely used networks in Europe.

Safety improvements at level crossings will continue, with the company pledging to close a further 500 crossings by 2019, investing more than £100m as part of its ongoing programme of work to improve safety and reduce risk to passengers and the wider public.

The next five years will also see Network Rail committing itself to furthering its environmental sustainability and resilience in the face of extreme weather and changing climate. By September, a series of ten route-based climate change strategies will be published, setting out specific measures to be taken to mitigate the effects of severe weather and improve the railway’s long-term sustainability.

Network Rail is committed to making even more trains run on time. By 2019 it has agreed to deliver punctuality levels of 92.5% across England, Wales and Scotland while running more trains and carrying more people than ever before. The company will also provide even better value for money for the British people, reducing annual government subsidy from around £4bn today to £2bn by 2019.

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 - National
020 3356 8700
mediarelations@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.