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Network Rail’s face of the May Day Bank Holiday, Paul Clark, from Kent, is used to spending his weekends and bank holidays working to improve the railway in the south east of England.

The historic building which has welcomed passengers to Market Harborough for decades will be kept as part of major upgrade work at the station.

Network Rail will invest £15m this May bank holiday to upgrade signalling in Sheffield and other parts of South Yorkshire to provide more reliable train services for passengers.

Rail chiefs today said a big thank you to passengers from London, Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, who have had to take weekend travel alternatives into London Liverpool Street since early February, after Network Rail completed a 10-weekend package of works as part of its Railway Upgrade Plan to provide a bigger, better, more reliable railway for passengers. 

Vandalism was the likely cause of widespread disruption affecting passengers in and out of Birmingham today, Network Rail said (Mon 11 April).

Train passengers heading through Oxenholme, Cumbria, are being urged to check before they travel over the early May bank holiday weekends as Network Rail's ‘orange army’ upgrades the railway.

With over 96% of the railway network unaffected by Network Rail planned improvement work, this coming bank holiday will be one of the least disruptive bank holidays for railway travel for many years.

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