NETWORK RAIL'S East Coast director Richard Lungmuss has revealed that an extra £17 million is being invested in the route, after a prolonged period during which performance has dived.

There have been signs of strain between Network Rail and operator East Coast, which called for improvements in the reliability of the infrastructure following falls in its key Public Performance Measure, or PPM.

Mr Lungmuss joined East Coast managing director Karen Boswell to set out the plans to get more trains running on schedule, which include intelligent monitoring of point motors and other key equipment, as well as a further clampdown on cable thieves and even a partnership with the Samaritans in a bid to reduce the number of suicides, which can seriously disrupt services.

Mr Lungmuss said: “Neither organisation is happy with where we are the moment, and I'll make no bones about that.”

One factor has been two severe winters, with 180,000 delay minutes being logged in 2010-11, compared with 56,000 minutes two years earlier, and he added: “The ECML is particularly vulnerable to severe winter weather, which often comes in from the north east. We are going to work very hard this coming winter to run a full service, but if this coming winter is poor, which will make it the third in a row, we'll know we're in a trend. If so, we'll have to spend a lot more money in future.”

Meanwhile, remote condition monitoring of points is now helping to reduce failures, with data being produced and transmitted to a server for analysis each time the blades are moved.

But it is cable thieves who pose one of the greatest threats, which has been made worse by the fact the value of a tonne of copper has tripled to £6,000 since the end of 2008.

Mr Lungmuss conceded that once the copper cores have been stripped out and melted down, the source of the metal can no longer be traced, and thieves are increasingly doing this at the site of the theft so that incriminating evidence, such as distinctive coatings, never reaches scrap dealers. It is even being said that one alleged thief brought a domestic barbecue to the trackside in order to melt the cable sheathing.

With the East Coast Main Line suffering 55 per cent of all rail cable thefts, he is calling for a change in the law so that dealers can no longer purchase metal for cash. “At the moment, there's a lot of what amounts to money laundering in parts of the scrap metal trade,” he warned.

But there are some encouraging signs too. Remote monitoring, also known as 'intelligent infrastructure', has already saved 7,728 delay minutes this year. East Coast is now running a more frequent timetable, with 19 weekday services added in May.

The operator's managing director Karen Boswell said: “The improvements promised by this investment cannot come soon enough. 80 per cent of delays are caused by factors beyond our control. There is still much to do to improve reliability.”