Network Rail faces huge fine for New Year line closures

Chief executive Iain Coucher was told by Ruth Kelly that delays were "unacceptable" and warned that his company faced a big fine for its failures. Their meeting came as the West Coast Main Line reopened after four days of disruption caused by engineering works that were not finished on time.

Ms Kelly said afterwards she had been given a clear undertaking there would be no repeat of the scandal.

"I made it very clear that the delays suffered by passengers are unacceptable and have asked to see the results of Network Rail's investigation into why control was lost over the engineering works as soon as possible," she said.

"While I understand Network Rail's improvements to the network involve complex and large-scale engineering work, I told Mr Coucher that I will not tolerate such over-runs in future.

"He has assured me that Network Rail will tighten its grip on these projects to ensure it does not happen again." She described the return-tonormal promised for today as "a belated relief ".

Work on the line, which serves Virgin services to the North-West and others, was due to end on New Year's Day, but Network Rail failed to ensure its sub-contractors had specialist engineers to do the job.

The chaos came after Liverpool Street was shut on 2 January following the over-running of a 10-day engineering project to replace a bridge.

Mr Coucher admitted his company had failed passengers. "I can take no comfort from this news in the knowledge of the pain and inconvenience we have caused passengers over the past few days," he said in a statement. "I know that we have let passengers down with the over-run at Rugby."

He said the project's managers, Bechtel, and the principal contractors would be summoned to a meeting-next week to explain why the work took so long. "They gave me assurances before Christmas on which they have not delivered," he added. "I want answers from them."

Virgin Trains said it was "pleased" with the assurances. The carpeting for Network Rail comes days after its chairman, Ian McAllister, was made a knight in the New Year Honours "for services to transport".

The company denied a claim today it was planning to "sack" private contractors and use in-house teams to carry out maintenance work in future.

The Times said the move was on the cards and called it a step towards renationalisation of the not-for-profit company that was set up in 2001 specifically to run and maintain the national railway tracks, replacing Railtrack.

More than a quarter of a million passengers have suffered from this week's disruptions, which Network Rail claims were the fault of contractors.

A senior Network Rail source was quoted as saying: "This episode calls into question the future role of contractors and one of the options is to take more of the work in-house."

That appeared to signal that contractors would lose their role of overseeing big renewal projects and could lose much of the £2.5 billion spent on maintenance each year.