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Monday 12 Dec 2016

Network Rail workers to miss Christmas with families to deliver vital upgrades in Doncaster

Region & Route:

| Eastern

Network Rail workers will be giving up Christmas with their families to carry out vital upgrades to the railway in Doncaster.

The improvements, part of the Railway Upgrade Plan, begin after the last service on Christmas Eve and will be completed before the first service on Tuesday, 27 December. The upgrade will see the installation of new signals, the traffic lights of the railway, which will be ‘bi-directional’ meaning trains will be able to run in either direction on a piece of track.

Once completed the upgrade will allow more flexibility for train services, which in turn will increase the reliability of services passing through Doncaster station, which can become a bottleneck due to the high number of services which use it. The upgrade will complement the opening of platform 0 at Doncaster station, a new platform which also provides greater flexibility for train services.

Doncaster man Darren Higgs, a scheme project manager at Network Rail, will be working on the project over the Christmas period.

He said: “I’ve been working on this project for two and a half years and the work which we are carrying out at Christmas is key to making sure the upgrade is completed on time.

“I’ll be working over Christmas this year. I’d love to be able to spend all of the Christmas period with my family, but I also need to think about my team. They are giving up Christmas with their families, so I feel it’s important that I’m out on site with them and offering my support. My role is to oversee the work which is going on and make sure we are on schedule.

“The work we’re doing over Christmas is so important to the railway in this area because it will make it more reliable for passengers. I’m a local lad, so it’s great to be able to be involved in something which will benefit my home town.”

This improvement programme is being carried out over Christmas, in order to minimise disruption to passengers. The work here is just one piece of a programme of over 200 upgrade projects, which are being delivered across Britain this holiday period.

This essential programme of investment is part of Network Rail’s Railway Upgrade Plan that provides more and faster services to help relieve over-crowding and responds to the tremendous growth encountered on Britain's railways.

Passengers are advised to check before they travel and can find a breakdown of how their journey may be affected by visiting nationalrail.co.uk/Christmas and following #ChristmasWorks on Twitter.