Plans to modernise the UK’s busiest railway line – giving it faster and more economical trains has ended up as a £10 billion failure.
In the 1990s, rail infrastructure firm Railtrack, decided to cut costs on a massive upgrade to the West Coast Main Line which runs between London and Glasgow by using a hi-tech signalling system that would allow the line to run high-speed trains at full speed.
It came after initial British rail plans to introduce new electric InterCity 250 to the line in the late 1980s were scrapped due to the track’s extensive curvature making it ill-suited to the trains.
Therefore the track would need to be realigned and even relayed in some places, meaning British Rail eventually abandoned the project in 1992.
When British Rail was privatised in 1994 the route was taken on by the newly formed Railtrack who drew up the plans for new block signalling and track which it valued at £2 billion.
If successful, plans would have seen high-speed trains running the route between England and Scotland at 140mph.
But Railtrack struggled to make the project work with the signalling technology struggling to cope with both mixed traffic on the line and its busy nature.
As it tried to make the project feasible costs continued to spiral, eventually totalling £10 billion for a scaled-back version of what the company had been planning.
The route modernisation eventually played a significant part in Railtrack’s bankruptcy in 2002.
Today the route is run by Avanti West Coast, with tilting trains travelling at 125mph doing the journey from London to Glasgow in just under four and a half hours.
The West Coast Main Line also stops off in Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool on its way to Scotland.
