Rail Minister confident £11.5bn rail upgrade can be completed in 10 years

He said “we remain on track” to complete the Transpennine Route Upgrade (TRU) by 2033 and deliver it within the £11.5bn budget when he opened a safety training centre for railway workers in Huddersfield.

He told The Yorkshire Post: “We’re all over it in terms of cost management. Construction inflation is relatively high at the moment but I’m confident the team have got everything under control.

“It’s a really complex programme of work because there are many tunnelling sections through the Pennines, but it’s hugely important to improve resilience and get better journey times in place.”

Workers are electrifying the 76-mile route, building new tracks, installing digital signalling equipment and upgrading stations.

The project, first announced back in 2011, will increase capacity – allowing eight more trains to run each hour – improve reliability.

It will also cut journey times, so people can travel between York and Manchester in 41 minutes and from Leeds to Manchester in 33 minutes.

The Government has been accused of mismanaging major rail projects, such as TRU and HS2, in recent years and causing costs to balloon by changing the plans and delaying construction.

Last year, the National Audit Office said the department had “taken too long” to make key decisions, “repeatedly altered” the plans since work began in 2015 and wasted £190m on designs that are “no longer needed”.

Mr Merriman refused to rule out further alterations, but said “we’re very confident” about the current plans.

Neil Holm, Managing Director of the TRU, the project is “going very well” and the work is “absolutely projected” to remain within the £11.5bn budget.

He also said three diversion routes have been successfully set up so railway services can continue to run while sections of the track are closed for construction work.

The Government promised £5.4bn for TRU when it published the Integrated Rail Plan in 2021, but then announced last year that up to £11.5bn will be required.

There are long-standing issues with overcrowding and poor reliability on the line, which reached full capacity in 2019 when less than 40 per cent of trains ran on time.

The Government sparked a backlash in 2021, when it announced plans for Northern Powerhouse Rail would be scaled back.

Transport for the North, which was preparing the business case for the project, called for a £43bn network, with high-speed lines running between Liverpool and Leeds, and a new stop in Bradford.

But the Government, which decided to take charge of the project in November, instead opted to spend £17.2bn on building a 40-mile line between Warrington and Marsden and upgrade the Transpennine Route.

It said Transport for the North’s preferred option would cost an extra £18bn, shave just four minutes off a trip from Manchester to Leeds and not be operational until 2043.