Rail passengers in Scotland have been hit with five months of weekend disruption on the West Coast mainline, despite assurances that a troubled £9bn upgrade of the arterial route had been completed in December.
Rail passengers in Scotland have been hit with five months of weekend disruption on the West Coast mainline, despite assurances that a troubled £9bn upgrade of the arterial route had been completed in December.
Engineering works being carried out by Network Rail (NR until mid-May have forced Virgin Trains to run replacement bus services on parts of the route between the Lake District and Glasgow, increasing journey times by more than two hours for all Saturday and Sunday services, The Herald has learned.
The news has angered passenger groups, who say they were not informed by NR, responsible for track maintenance and renewal, that major work was planned for the first half of this year and only found out when examining train timetables.
The revelation of further disruption comes as a blow to NR, which suffered public outrage, political criticism and an unprecedented £14m fine by regulators for overruns to its modernisation programme that saw thousands of passengers suffer lengthy delays over the Christmas holidays in 2007.
It has also caused a rift with Virgin Trains, the main passenger operator on the route, which has been diverting passengers on to coaches on all weekend services between Oxenholme and Lockerbie from January 31 to March 22 and is due to run replacement coaches from Lockerbie to Glasgow and Edinburgh between the weekends of March 28 and May 16.
Passenger Focus accused NR, a not-for-profit agency, of not being upfront with the public.
Julie Warburton, passenger link manager for Virgin Trains at Passenger Focus, said: "Passengers have struggled long and hard to try to get decent rail services at weekends. The £9bn upgrade was hailed as the end of the disruption and meant we would get a seven-day service, with weekends as good as midweek.
"That's all very well if you're travelling (from London) to the Midlands but what about passengers in Scotland and the north of England who are still really struggling at weekends?"
NR insisted yesterday the latest engineering projects - two track renewal works between Oxenholme in the Lakes and Wamphray north of Lockerbie - were never intended to be part of the route modernisation programme.
A spokesman said: "Our engineers are undertaking track renewal work on the West Coast mainline as part of our ongoing maintenance of what is one of the busiest pieces of railway in Europe. The work is not an extension of the £9bn enhancement project completed last December. The renewals are being carried out during weekends to minimise the impact on passengers."
However, Virgin Trains accused NR of hiding behind a "technicality". A spokesman said: "There maybe a technical argument the work being carried out now wasn't part of the £9bn specification of works.
"But from a passenger perspective, to be told engineering work had finished only to find that in northern England and Scotland there are several weekends of engineering works causes confusion."
Tom Harris, the Labour MP for Glasgow South and former transport minister, said: "I can understand if you need to work on the railways that there will be disruption.
"But I'm disappointed Network Rail didn't feel it could be more transparent when explaining what it was doing."
Garry Clark, of the Scottish Chambers of Commerce, warned it could impact on Scotland's tourism sector.
