Media centre

Thursday 30 Apr 2015

Vital weekend engineering works to keep Scotland’s railway moving

Region & Route:

Scotland’s Railway: Scotland

 

Network Rail engineers will be delivering over £12m of improvement projects on key lines on Scotland’s railway during May.

This holiday weekend, hundreds of engineers will be working around-the-clock to replace track and renew and refurbish bridges on the cross-border West Coast Mainline, and other lines linking Lanarkshire and Glasgow.

In Newton, engineers will be demolishing the existing life-expired road-over-rail bridge on Old Mill Road in readiness for its replacement with a new structure. This weekend will be the first of four weekends of work in May to deliver the new, £4m bridge. In Motherwell, engineers will also be working to refurbish and repaint the metal pedestrian footbridge over West Coast Mainline near the Logan’s Road level crossing.

At Law junction, sections of track will be renewed as part of a £6m project to upgrade the junction over the next three weekends, while near Lockerbie engineers will be renewing track and improving drainage under the West Coast Mainline in a £1.5m project to help improve reliability.

Mark Carne, chief executive of Network Rail, said: “Our improvement programme this bank holiday is focussed on delivering a better service for passengers.  We are acutely conscious that many people want to use the railway over the bank holiday to reunite with their friends and families, which is why the vast majority of the network is running normally over the long weekend.

“We’d like to apologise to any passengers whose plans are affected by our improvement work, but I hope they will understand that this is a quieter time on the railway and we want to minimise the overall impact of these vital projects on passengers.”

The completion of these projects will impact on services on some ScotRail routes, including those to Lanark, Larkhall and Edinburgh (via Motherwell). Cross-border services will also be affected over the weekend.

Details of the changes to services are available from the train operators’ websites or via http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/