Transpennine Route Upgrade will take '10 to 15 years' to complete as budget is increased

He said the upgrade will increase capacity, with an extra two passenger trains every hour, cut journey times by up to 40 per cent and allow passengers to travel from Leeds to Manchester in 33 minutes.

The investment will be used to completely electrify the 76-mile line, which runs between York and Manchester, and install digital signalling equipment along the route.

The number of tracks will be doubled to four between Huddersfield and Westtown in Dewsbury, to increase capacity for passenger and freight services.

The Department for Transport had promised £5.4bn for the project, when it published the Integrated Rail Plan in November, but its latest projection stated between £9bn and £11.5bn will be required and the work will not be completed until 2036 at the earliest.

Mr Shapps said the budget for the project, first announced in 2011, has been increased because it has “totally changed”, not because costs have overrun.

He told The Yorkshire Post: “It’s an entirely different project. The previous version didn’t electrify the whole of the route.

“The previous version didn’t do digital signalling or build the new lines. So this is really the full fat project that’s going to mean you can travel from Manchester to Leeds in 33 minutes.”

He added: “This is the single biggest investment any government has ever made in Britain’s railways. It’s right up there and probably beyond what the Victorians were doing.”

The line was used by more than 135m passengers before the Covid-19 pandemic, but there are long-standing issues with overcrowding and poor reliability.

The Department of Transport has accepted the line has reached full capacity and less than 40 per cent of trains ran on time in 2019.

Mr Shapps added: “It will take 10 to 15 years to deliver the entire line, but that’s probably a decade faster than it would have been to deliver the alternative, which would have been trying to blast brand-new tunnels through the Pennines.

“We thought (that option) was expensive, time-consuming in terms of opening and ultimately really not very much faster.”

The Government sparked a backlash in November, when it announced plans for Northern Powerhouse Rail would be scaled back, as part of the £96bn Integrated Rail Plan.

Transport for the North, which was preparing the business case for the project, called for a new high-speed line to be built between Leeds and Manchester, with a stop in Bradford, and a new line from Warrington to Liverpool.

But the Government, which decided to take charge of the project in November, instead opted to spend £17.2bn on building a 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.

Under the current plans, the Government expects some NPR services to “start running this decade” and the train journey from Manchester to Leeds will be cut by 22 minutes.