It goes without saying that the railway relies heavily upon its supporting structures to ensure a safe and reliable service. Protecting steel bridges with today’s high performance anti-corrosive coating systems helps to minimise maintenance downtime and limit the number of disrupted journeys. Rail bridges have a significant life expectancy. But environmental factors can have a damaging impact on steel structures if...

Those carrying out track maintenance on the Snowdon Mountain Railway are used to working in hostile conditions during the closed season. But this winter has proved particularly difficult, with snow drifting at much lower levels than usual. A 50-metre gap in the track at their Clogwyn worksite, 2,500 feet above sea level, has been inaccessible due to heavy drifting further...

Graeme Bickerdike reports... As a Yorkshireman with ‘Thrift’ for a middle name, today’s throwaway culture causes me much unease. There is a drawer in the bottom of our sideboard where mobile phones breed - there must be a dozen in there now with the earliest apparently dating back to Alexander Graham Bell. Men keep turning up with new, ever-sleeker devices for...

Network Rail has published the final version of the Route Utilisation Strategy (RUS) for Kent, which sets out a 30-year vision to create a bigger and better railway to serve Kent, parts of East Sussex and south London. Longer and faster trains, more journey options into London, better access to stations and improved reliability are all recommended outputs to meet future...

Plans to develop one of the most sustainable office buildings in the country were given the go-ahead as Network Rail’s new national centre received the stamp of approval from Milton Keynes’ planning authority. The centre will bring together teams spread across numerous sites under one eco-friendly roof, improving the way Network Rail coordinates activities to build a bigger and better railway....

  Thousands of more seats, new services and faster journey times are just some of the benefits that 'Eureka!' ,the name given to East Coast's new timetable, will bring to passengers. The new timetable will come in to force from  22nd May ,2011 and has been in development for over a decade. It will deliver 25 extra services. faster average journey times...

Travel journalist and former Monty Python star Michael Palin helped officially launch Wrexham and Shropshire Railway's new trains into passenger service during a short ceremony at Marylebone station. The train operator has now taken delivery of all 4 of its refurbished trains, a total investment of £5.5m, which operate between Wrexham and London Marylebone. Andy Hamilton, MD of WSR, said "Everything we...

Sexist and outdated public perceptions about job opportunities for women in the rail industry are a damaging barrier to building a bigger and better railway Britain needs, according to Network Rail chief executive Iain Coucher. Network Rail today launches a campaign to attract more talented women to the company, further improving the overall skills of the workforce and addressing the poor...

Transport secretary Lord Adonis is proposing that in the future passenger rail franchises should run for at least a decade and maybe for as long as 22 years. This will encourage train operators to invest in improvements to infrastructure and rolling stock, as in the recent announcement of Chiltern's Evergreen 3 project, but the flip side is that operators face...

Despite the severe weather over the past month, eight out of 10 trains still ran to time and almost 92%, or 19,000 each weekday, of scheduled services ran. The figures were released today in Network Rail's regular monthly report on train performance that, during the four weeks from 13 December to 9 January, 80% of services arrived on time.  This compares...

The 17 January 2010 marked one month since the launch of the high-speed Sapsan train service between Moscow and St Petersburg.From 17 December 2009 to 17 January 2010, high-speed Sapsan trains carried 77,043 passengers, meaning that the average daily passenger count is around 2,500.The Sapsan trains run three times daily on a mirror timetable, departing simultaneously from St Petersburg and...