Click here to listen to the latest rail news on Wednesday, 13th March 2024.
InTheNews: The latest rail news on Wednesday, 13th March 2024
More than 95 per cent of Britain’s 10,000 miles of railway will be open for business this Easter – with some exceptions – as Network Rail engineers gear up for a £90 million programme of work over the long weekend aimed at improving the railway for passengers and freight businesses.
The majority of improvement work will actually be carried out overnight, but some bigger pieces of work need longer to complete and whilst most of the network will be open and unaffected, a handful of key routes will be impacted , and Network Rail is asking passengers to check their journey details before they travel.
Network Rail’s network strategy director, Laurence Bowman, said: “When we do close the railway, we do everything we can to get as much work into those closures as possible. We’ve got 493 different pieces of work taking place this Easter, most happening overnight, including laying over 8,000 metres of new rail and putting down over 40,000 tonnes of new ballast to support the tracks.”
HS2 is hoping to start tunnelling work from Old Oak Common station to the mothballed Euston station next year.
An article on the Building website says a team featuring Costain, Skanska and Strabag has begun work to tunnel the route from West Ruislip to Old Oak Common – which is where HS2 trains will terminate in the capital when the railway first opens.
But the same London tunnels team, officially called SCS, is expected to start the tunnel drive to Euston in 2025.
Office of Rail and Road (ORR) says it has had constructive and positive engagement from the seven retailers it wrote to with concerns about their use of ‘drip pricing’, which is when consumers are shown an initial price for a product or service before additional fees are revealed later in the purchase process.
Consumers can be disproportionately influenced by the first and most prominent price they see and can be drawn into paying more than they intended or needed to.
ORR wrote to MyTrainTicket, Omio, Raileasy, RailEurope, Trainhugger, Trainline and Trainpal about drip-pricing in their purchasing processes. In their responses, several retailers stated that they have already made interim improvements and are planning more substantial changes in the short term. Two retailers have not yet implemented changes but will do so later in the year. ORR will monitor progress towards proposed changes and will hold the companies to account.
Operator Northern has announced that, from April, Nick Clarke will be serving as its new Head of Retail.
Nick, from York in North Yorkshire, will be responsible for all elements of the ticket buying experience.
He will also lead the train operator’s revenue protection strategy and its ongoing drive to reduce ticketless travel on its services across the region.
