Government to pay for essential Metro upgrade

THE Government will pay for an essential upgrade to prevent the Tyne and Wear Metro suffering a catastrophic shutdown.

- DANIEL HOLLAND

North East transport chiefs have been pushing ministers to back a £400m replacement of the Metro's outdated signalling system, a "safety critical" asset dating back to the 1970s and without which the Metro cannot operate.

Bosses have warned that a failure to update the infrastructure by 2030 would put the rail network at risk of being completely crippled, an embarrassing prospect given the £362m public investment into its long-awaited new fleet of trains and plans to extend to Washington.

The Department for Transport (DfT) has now confirmed that it "will be funding the upgrade", saying that the project would "enhance journey times, improve reliability and safety, and enable future expansion of the network".

At time of writing, the DfT had not yet announced exactly how much money it will put into the scheme or where that money will come from.