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As part of its £40bn Railway Upgrade Plan, Network Rail has completed a £29million upgrade to the track and foundation of the railway between Basingstoke and Eastleigh in half the usual time by using state-of-the-art track renewal and ballast cleaning machines.

• 25km of track replaced
• 64,000 tonnes of ballast replaced
• 38,000 new railway sleepers laid

A new and improved bridge over the railway on Station Road, Shrivenham, was opened today (Friday 8 April) after Network Rail’s work to construct the bridge as part its Great Western Electrification Programme was completed on time.

• Network Rail and Transport for London will be holding drop-in sessions at stations to answer questions
• Work to install new infrastructure will require a phased programme of closures from June this year

• Journeys on the route to be improved and capacity doubled with new four-carriage electric trains from early 2018

• New permanent bridge over Great Western Main Line in Iver replaces the temporary bridge that has been in place since 2014
• New bridge accommodates overhead cables needed  to introduce greener, quieter, more reliable electric trains
• Click here to download a selection of images of the new bridge

A severely damaged stretch of railway near Dover will need to be completely replaced with a new viaduct before trains can run again.

Daniel Zeichner MP for Cambridge visited the site of a new £50m station north of Cambridge today (1 April 2016), which is anticipated to handle 3,000 passenger journeys a day once opened.

Over all four days of the Easter weekend, the East Kent re-signalling team took over the railway between Longfield, Sittingbourne, and the Isle of Sheppey, to commission a brand-new system to control trains.

A Network Rail community relations executive has helped to inspire young people from across Essex with hearing loss, when he gave a presentation to children at St Clere’s school in Stanford-Le-Hope this week.