Peter Hendy: You deserve better, so bear with us as we fix railways

Evening Standard readers will know only too well that recent train performance in London, and indeed throughout the country, has not been good enough.

Network Rail knows that and recognises the part we’ve played in poor performance. Passengers expect, and deserve, better.

New chief executive Andrew Haines and I also realise that passengers get frustrated when their weekend and bank holiday journeys are affected by engineering work and line closures. We do all we can to minimise disruption. We carry out these huge schemes over Christmas and New Year as during the festive period the railway is 50 per cent quieter than normal.

It will be business as usual on the vast majority of the rail network over the holidays, but some routes will be heavily affected, and we ask customers on these to plan their journeys in advance.

The railway is vital to Britain’s economic growth, creating jobs and building more housing. The network is a success — the number of passengers has doubled in 20 years. Our challenge is to keep capacity growing at the same time and make the railway more reliable. Maintenance, renewals and enhancements are necessary to look after and improve our system, which was first built in the Victorian era, and wasn’t designed to carry 4.7 million passengers every day.

This Christmas, a 25,000-strong workforce will deliver more than 330 projects as part of a £148 million investment package across Britain.

Londoners will benefit directly from a number of these projects. Track renewal at Holloway will improve the reliability of services into King’s Cross. The overhead wiring system at Forest Gate junction — installed in the Fifties — will be upgraded to prevent frequent failures that currently cause delays into Liverpool Street; new track will be installed at Battersea Pier junction, near Victoria, to improve reliability for the 240,000 passengers who travel over it every day; and bridge-strengthening works will be taking place at Upper Kennington Lane, near Vauxhall station, on the line to Waterloo, where 100 metres of track is also set to be replaced.

Network Rail is committed to reversing the decline in train punctuality that passengers have experienced recently. The investment this Christmas is just one part of a much bigger plan to do that, and to help improve the underlying reliability of railway infrastructure on which your journeys rely.

So Christmas and bank holiday renewal and upgrade work is a key part of that, giving our engineers significantly more time than usually possible to make uninterrupted progress on vital projects that will make the network more reliable and better for our customers. Thank you for your tolerance over Christmas and the New Year.

• Sir Peter Hendy is chairman of Network Rail and the London Legacy Development Corporation