Half year results for the six months to 30 September 2013 show that £2.74bn, some £15m per day, was invested in improving and building a bigger, better railway - 33 per cent up on the same period last year and 53 per cent higher than just four years ago.
Patrick Butcher, group finance director, Network Rail said, “The railway continues to experience tremendous growth and we are responding to that demand through the biggest sustained investment programme since Victorian times.
With a million more trains and half a billion more passengers than 10 years ago our railways are all but full. We are squeezing all we can out of the existing network and new railway lines such as HS2, must be built to deliver the step-change in capacity that Britain’s vital rail arteries need.”
Key projects
Over the past six months some significant investment milestones have been reached, including:
· King's Cross: New, bigger, better facilities at King’s Cross as the £550m renovation and rebuilding nears completion providing a magnificent gateway to the north and a concourse three times the size of the old
· Reading station: The new concourse at Reading station, part of the ongoing £850m project to unblock one of Britain's worst railway bottlenecks
· North West electrification: A more reliable and affordable railway for the people of Manchester, Liverpool and the North West as we continue with the £400m project to electrify railway in the region
· Nottingham: More reliable and faster services delivered with the successful completion of the £100m resignalling and modernisation of Nottingham and its approaches
· Hitchin flyover: A major bottleneck on the East Coast Main Line has been removed with the completion of the £47m Hitchin flyover
· Midland Main Line: Faster journeys for passengers along the Midland Main Line connecting Sheffield, Nottingham, Derby and other towns and cities to London as a result of a £70m improvement programme
· Shrewsbury and Wrexham: Completion of the £10m scheme to modernise the railway between Shrewsbury and Wrexham
Smaller projects
As well as the major milestones, we've completed over 5,000 other projects over the last four and a half years (since the start of our current funding period 1 April 2009 to 31 March 2014). These smaller, but just as important projects aimed at making incremental improvements to the railway for the benefit of passengers, and have seen:
· Over 2,000 miles of track renewed
· Improvements at over 500 stations across the country
· Almost 200 lifts installed at stations
· Over 140 platforms lengthened across London and the South East
