Network Rail promises £35 billion railway revolution

THE head of Network Rail promised today the biggest expansion of the national railway system since the days of the great Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Iain Coucher said the company is planning to spend £35billion over the next five years.

Of this, £12billion will go on easing chronic overcrowding with longer platforms to take 12-carriage trains. A further £11.5billion is to be spent on replacing old parts of the network including tracks and signalling to enable trains to run faster. A total of £11.4billion is earmarked for day to day maintenance.

Among the projects to benefit will be Thameslink which will see capacity increase through London by 400 per cent, said Mr Coucher.

Crossrail is to get more money, King's Cross station will be re-developed and the track bottleneck around Reading station will be eased. Mr Coucher, NR chief executive, said: "Britain is poised on the brink of a rail revolution."

He pledged that over the next five years "we will see a transformed railway through ambitious plans that will deliver more trains, more seats, longer trains and faster trains.

"Services will be even more reliable, delays caused by the infrastructure (such as signal failures) will be cut by 25 per cent. We will embark upon an investment programme that is bigger and more ambitious than anything seen in generations."

But, he warned: "Delivering all this will require major changes across the industry and we should not underestimate the difficulties that are ahead."

He said that the previous five years had been all about "putting right the ills of the railway...the next five years will be focused on doing the basics even better and delivering a bigger, better railway for passengers and freight." He said Network Rail was embarking "upon one of the most exciting chapters in the history of our railways", adding: "Network Rail is ready to unleash the biggest expansion since the age of Brunel."

He said Network Rail has around £4billion extra to spend between now and 2014 than originally thought. Last year NR submitted plans to spend about £30billion - but this was cut back by the controlling Office of Rail Regulation. But, following negotiations with the ORR and recalculations to include future interest rate reductions, NR will now be spending a record £35billion.

More than three million passengers travel by rail every day - the vast majority in London and the South-East.

Although the number of extra passengers using the railways has slowed due to the credit crunch, overall the figure remains on the increase. This means chronic overcrowding, particularly on routes from Kent and south-east London in Charing Cross, Victoria and Cannon Street stations and on Thameslink, the north-south through London service.

NR aims, by 2014, to achieve record punctuality levels of 92.6 per cent across England and Wales and 92 per cent in Scotland. This compares with 90 per cent now and 78 per cent when NR took over from Railtrack seven years ago.

Mr Coucher, who has placed his head on the block with such bold predictions, concluded: "Stations will be transformed and new ones built. Speeds will be increased. Bottlenecks will be unblocked. Thousands of new trains will debut, services will run more frequently at weekends and at bank holidays." NR is currently under fire from the rail watchdogs for closing key routes over Easter and for the number of weekend shutdowns while maintenance and rebuilding work takes place. And yesterday it was revealed that the number of new train carriages trumpeted by the government has been cut back from 1,300 to 1,000.