Network Rail to spend 35b pounds over next five years

London: The head of Network Rail on Tuesday promised 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 £35 billion over the next five years.

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

Coucher 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 £4 billion extra to spend between now and 2014 than originally thought. Last year NR submitted plans to spend about £30 billion 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 £35 billion.

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