THE final piece of the jigsaw dropped into place as Network Rail completed its £9 billion upgrade of the West Coast main line at Rugby.

The completion on 7 December opened the way for 1,000 extra services a week over the already busy route, slashed journey times and gave a 70 per cent increase in freight capacity.

Five years after the start of the project and with lessons learned from Christmas and New Year overrun problems in 2007/8, the company successfully hit more than a dozen key milestones during last year.

The project has seen changes to all 13 major junctions on the route, eliminating a bottleneck at Rugby and clearing the way for 125mph running. More than 24 miles of new track were laid through the Trent Valley, providing four tracks for almost the entire distance between London and Crewe.

A total of 174 bridges were renewed or altered and 53 platforms renewed or extended at key locations such as Milton Keynes and Manchester Airport. More than 800 sets of points were replaced and line speeds increased between Preston, Carlisle and Motherwell and London Euston and Wembley.

Finally, more than 11,000 new structures were erected and a total of over three million yards of rail, ballast and sleepers were laid.

Network Rail’s chief executive Iain Coucher said: “It has been a long road and an extraordinarily complex project to rebuild Europe’s busiest mixed traffic railway, but we have delivered West Coast on the day we said we would, and the infrastructure is now ready for new, faster and more frequent services.

“When Network Rail took over this critical project, it was a mess… billions of pounds over budget and undeliverable. We’ve re-written the rule book on project delivery.”