Sir, Network Rail is acutely aware of the consequences to passengers when it is only possible to give short notice of engineering works, and is sorry for the inconvenience recent problems with advance notice have caused (report and leading article, August 24).
However, the current problems are partly the product of the unprecedented amounts of work Network Rail is doing to rebuild the railway, especially on the West Coast Main Line.
We are replacing almost three times as much track per year as Railtrack was five years ago and whilst the majority of this work has no effect on train services, the biggest, most complex tasks necessitate alterations to the normal timetable requiring very detailed planning.
The target of 12 weeks’ notice could be met immediately simply by reducing the amount of engineering work being done on the network. But the consequence of this would be to reduce the reliability of services, which have now seen ten successive months of improvement. We do not think passengers would see this as sensible.
Network Rail has agreed a plan with the Rail Regulator to get back to 12 weeks’ notice by September 2005 and we are determined to do so. Whilst we still have a long way to go, everyone at Network Rail is working tirelessly to improve the railway for passengers and with punctuality at a four-year high, we believe we are now making significant progress in the right direction.
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Yours faithfully,
JOHN ARMITT,
Chief Executive,
Network Rail,
40 Melton Street, NW1 2EE.
August 25.