The West Coast Main Line near Stafford has reopened on time after Network Rail completed four days of upgrade work to track and bridges over Christmas.
Engineers laid track as part of a £250 million project to upgrade the WCML through Stafford.
Two bridges carrying the railway over local waterways were also replaced as part of NR's Railway Upgrade Plan.
The trackwork this Christmas is vital to help bring a new railway flyover into use at Easter 2016, which will remove a bottleneck on the main route between England and Scotland and provide passengers with a more reliable railway.
Mark Killick, area director for Network Rail, said: “This work is part of a £250m programme of rail investment to help improve performance and reliability of the West Coast Main Line. It was carefully planned and safely delivered to cause the least disruption to passengers, with work taking place on Christmas Day and Boxing Day when no trains would have run and over the Christmas bank holiday when fewer people use the railway.
“Our Railway Upgrade Plan is consistently delivering improvements and this Christmas has been no different with thousands of the orange army working across the network to maintain and upgrade the railway to meet the demands of the millions of passengers who travel by train every day.”
- For much more on the Christmas engineering projects on the railway over Christmas, read RAIL 793, published on January 20.
Andrewjgwilt1989 - 29/12/2015 18:52
What about Network Rail to upgrade some of the key junctions on the ECML including building a new flyover at Colton Junction where the ECML meets with the 4-track North Pennine lines with a new flyover to be built for Northbound trains heading to Scotland as well to York, Newcastle and Sunderland freeing up the 4 tracks for First TPE and Northern Rail trains and freight trains that seperates near Leeds. And also improving Helpton Junction north of Peterborough with a possible flyover for the Peterborough-Nottingham and Stamford line as it seperates from the ECML. Doncaster North Junction is already been improved with a new freight link being built crossing over the ECML north of Doncaster. And Hitchin Flyover in Hitchin, Hertfordshire which has been built that crosses over the ECML for Great Northern trains to cross over the ECML heading towards Cambridge and King's Linn.