NETWORK Rail has failed to reach its targets over the winter months, said the Office of Rail Regulation.

The company has missed regulatory requirements covering punctuality, delays and cancellations.

Performance slipped in autumn, and was seriously affected by the severe winter weather.

The company may now be facing a penalty for a breach of its network licence, but that will depend to some extent on how much Network Rail tried to keep on course.

ORR chief executive Bill Emery said: “Over recent years Network Rail has worked with the rail industry to improve performance on Britain’s railway and has raised expectations of what our railways should be delivering.

“Recent performance, however, has not been good enough. Network Rail will miss many of its annual performance targets this year.

“The company is coming in to explain what went wrong and why, and what it is doing to restore performance.”

Meanwhile it has also been announced that Network Rail is to take over the management of Evergreen 3, the latest upgrade to the Chiltern Railways network. This includes track upgrades so that Chiltern can accelerate its London-Birmingham services.

Chiltern chairman Adrian Shooter said: “At the end of January Chiltern’s Project Director retired. The replacement Project Director is a Network Rail employee who reports to a Governance Panel chaired by Chiltern Railways and including senior Network Rail staff.

“This joint approach to project management combines Network Rail’s experience with Chiltern’s unique ability to identify the infrastructure improvements which are needed, and doing so without the need for subsidy from the taxpayer.

“Chiltern Railways remains the scheme sponsor.”

The operator had already announced that the planned improvements would be postponed from May to ‘late summer’, because it feared that late-running works would cause unacceptable disruption to passengers.

The move will be seen as a blow to ATOC, which wants its members to take over more responsibility for infrastructure.

Network Rail has just announced a programme of devolution, in which individual route directors will be running their areas as sem-autonomous businesses, with their own financial accounts.

The first two routes, Scotland and Wessex, are due to be converted next month.