Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, how many miles of new railway was built and in which regions (a) from 1997 to 2010 and (b) from 2010 to date.

The Office of Rail and Road publish railway infrastructure statistics, which contain the total length of track in Great Britain (including Scotland). The table below gives total track length from 1999-00. This information is not available by region and this data is not available prior to 1999.

The year-on-year change in track length is the net change of new track added minus length of track closed. Therefore, a year-on-year increase does not necessarily equal the total length of new track added.

Track Miles of the rail network in Great Britain. Source: ORR

1 Prior to 2004-05 route length data and electrification data was collected using various systems and collected on a semi-annual basis. These systems, whilst often the most accurate measures available at the time, would not have provided as accurate a measure as the GEOGIS system and there is therefore a break in the time series between 2003-04 and 2004-05.

2 There is a break in the time series between 2006-07 and 2007-08 due to a new methodology where the route classification reference data was revamped.

3 There is a break in the time series between 2016-17 and 2017-18 due to Network Rail replacing GEOGIS, its master database for track assets, with a new system called INM (Integrated Network Model).This means any comparison of the current route length with previous years must be treated with caution.