TWO Network Rail engineering specialists are being drafted into a new maintenance organisation focusing on infrastructure problems on the southern part of the West Coast main line.

The crack engineers – a track specialist from the East Coast main line and an overhead line engineer from Great Eastern – will join a new WCML south management team headed up by Fred Rooth.

The moves are part of a major restructuring of the WCML maintenance support organisation.

Network Rail has split engineering management of the route’s maintenance depots between infrastructure maintenance director, north, Jim Sydall, and his opposite number for the south.  Other specialist may be drafted in.

Since the start of the year the route has been dogged by infrastructure problems leading to train disruption. At one stage recently Virgin Trains achieved only 53 per cent punctuality.

News of the maintenance shake-up came as Network Rail announced that 90.6 per cent of trains nationally were arriving on time between April 2008 and March 2009, the highest performance total in 20 years.

But performance of WCML users London Midland and Virgin Trains still lagged behind with LM at 86.5 annual punctuality and Virgin Trains at 80 per cent, despite improvements from 2004 figures.

In a hard-hitting statement Virgin Trains said: “After pounds 9 billion was spent customers have every right to expect performance to be at least as good as the rest of the country. This has not happened and sadly it proves that many if our past concerns about Network Rail were correct.”

Virgin has complained formally to the Office of Rail Regulation.

NR’s director of operations and customer service Robin Gisby said the overall improvements to punctuality were down to several key strategies but the company was “far from complacent” and the focus was to drive performance to even higher levels.