All change Timetable revamp faces its toughest crowd - the passengers

Billions of pounds of investment, years of engineering works - and now the moment of truth.

- Gwyn Topham Transport correspondent

A revamped railway timetable goes live across Great Britain tomorrow, with the biggest fanfare and radical changes for the east coast mainline, where passengers are promised more train services, faster journeys and a new era of reliability.But the spectre of a previous, disastrous timetable change from May 2018 still looms over the railway. So will tomorrow’s revamp be the great gift for passengers that the industry expects?

LNER, the leading intercity operator on the line from London to Scotland, will have 60,000 extra seats a week in total, and cut the fastest journey times from the UK capital to Edinburgh to just over four hours, and to Leeds to a little over two, with six instead of five trains an hour out of Kings Cross most of the day.

More TransPennine Express trains will run north of Newcastle upon Tyne and there will be more East Midlands services between Nottingham and Lincoln. Northern will start a new hourly fast service between Leeds and Sheffield, and more trains from Middlesbrough. At the southern end, Greater Anglia and Thameslink are tweaking routes and adding extra seats.