Media centre

Tuesday 6 May 2008

RAILWAY RETURNS TO NORMAL AFTER SUCCESSFUL £75M MAY BANK HOLIDAY FACELIFT

Region & Route:

National

Train services on Britain’s key rail routes through the Midlands on the West Coast Main Line and into south and east London returned to normal today after extensive improvement works were carried out by Network Rail over the May bank holiday weekend. A series of other works across the country was also completed on time.

During the three days over 5,000 people worked to deliver £75million worth of work to improve passengers’ journeys by making tracks, signals and overhead lines more reliable and enabling additional services to run. The work on the West Coast Main Line is part of the £8.6bn project to help reduce journey times (e.g London to Manchester in less than two hours) and increase the frequency of services. All this was achieved with 80% of services continuing to run.

Iain Coucher Network Rail chief executive said: “This weekend continued our massive improvement programme to deliver a bigger, better railway for passengers and freight users. Our job was to do this invisibly - to get in, rip up the old railway, put in a new better one - and then get out on time, while causing the least amount of disruption possible. We’ve done this successfully, and we must continue to do so for the future.

“Our planning and preparation for major works is now more robust and the successful delivery of the work this May bank holiday is how it should be. We will continue to strive for better working across the industry to further improve how we deliver the enormous amount of work still to come as we build a railway for the future to meet the expectation of rail users.”

In the run up to the May bank holiday Network Rail worked closely with train operating companies and National Rail Enquiries to provide information to passengers about the work being carried out and on how to plan their journey. Network Rail also continued its 'direct to passenger' media advertising campaign about the May bank holiday work programme. Advertisements appeared on websites (e.g. Google, Streetmap, Multimap, thisislondon).