West Coast Main Line route modernisation

It links the cities of London, Glasgow, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Preston, Lancaster and Carlisle.

Railtrack asked the government for more money to complete the project but the Labour Party Secretary of State for Transport Stephen Byers put the company into liquidation.

[22][23][24] The Strategic Rail Authority published a document in June 2003 which re-examined and clarified many of the assumptions and specified the direction and scope of the whole project.

The length of the project was just short of 11 years (110 months) and the final contract cost of approximately 9 billion pounds.

It is claimed it was part of the reason that the BBC decided to move its main operations from London to the north.

[35] The Campaign for Better Transport (United Kingdom) in their paper entitled "Transformation of the West Coast Main Line" stated there are 40% more long distance services overall.

However, money ran out and so the south end of the line still uses Wembley which controls assets that fail frequently.

[42] Carstairs has long being considered a bottleneck on the WCML and improvements including signalling, track renewal and other work finished in October 2022.

[43] The work also included substantial realigning of tracks and platforms to give line speed increases[44] and needed a 12-week closure but was completed on time.

Parts of the route, including Preston- Carlisle is sometimes called congested infrastructure due to power supply constraints.