Flooding: Transport Disruption Debate

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Department: Department for Transport

Flooding: Transport Disruption

Marcus Jones Excerpts
Thursday 13th February 2014

(10 years, 9 months ago)

Commons Chamber
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Lord McLoughlin Portrait Mr McLoughlin
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The hon. Lady makes a good point. I have asked the train operating companies to do a lot more on the social media network, which they are doing. One of the frustrating aspects of this situation for people is trying to get information. A lot of people who use the railways do not use social media, and there is a difficulty there, but we are trying to make as much information available as we possibly can.

Marcus Jones Portrait Mr Marcus Jones (Nuneaton) (Con)
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These are unprecedented weather conditions, and I commend my right hon. Friend for the work he is doing. I also commend all the people across the country who are working so hard to get our rail and road network open again and back to normal. Many of my constituents depend daily on the west coast main line. What more is the Secretary of State doing to make sure that there is better resilience against this type of weather on that line?

Lord McLoughlin Portrait Mr McLoughlin
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As I said, north of Rugby, a huge amount of money has been invested on the west coast main line. There is still more work to be done; for example, there is more work to be done on signalling, which will be happening this year as far as Watford is concerned. That will have an impact, providing better resilience overall to the services to which my hon. Friend refers. As he rightly says, that line is one of the busiest railway lines anywhere in Europe.