Total route modernisation is a concept first introduced by

British Railways British Railways (BR), which from 1965 traded as British Rail, was a state-owned company that operated most rail transport in Great Britain from 1948 to 1997. Originally a trading brand of the Railway Executive of the British Transport Commis ...

whereby a particular railway route is upgraded in one "big bang", with track, signalling and often stations and rolling stock all being renewed or modernised simultaneously in a multifaceted programme of works. This is in contrast to the more traditional process under which a line of route is gradually improved over time with a series of piecemeal incremental upgrades, such as electrifying a line while leaving the signalling as it is, or easing out bottleneck junctions one at a time, or gradually raising line speeds by individual bits of track realignment over different stretches of line over a long period, as had been the typical approach over many decades on, notably, the

East Coast Main Line The East Coast Main Line (ECML) is a electrified railway between its northern terminus at and southern terminus at . The key towns and cities of , , , , and are on the line. The line is a key transport artery on the eastern side of Grea ...

. An example of total route modernisation was that of the

Chiltern Main Line The Chiltern Main Line is a railway line which links London () and Birmingham (Birmingham Moor Street railway station, Moor Street and Birmingham Snow Hill railway station, Snow Hill) on a route via High Wycombe, Bicester, Banbury, Leamington ...

carried out by British Rail's

Network SouthEast Network SouthEast (NSE) was one of the three passenger sectors of British Rail created in 1982. NSE mainly operated commuter rail trains within Greater London and inter-urban services in densely populated South East England, although the networ ...

sector. Under this scheme, mechanical semaphore signals were replaced with new colour-light signalling, a new fleet of Class 165 "Chiltern Turbo" diesel trains was introduced,

Automatic Train Protection Automatic train protection (ATP) is the generic term for train protection systems that continually check that the speed of a train is compatible with the permitted speed allowed by signalling, including automatic stop at certain signal aspects ...

was fitted, line speeds were raised, and stations refurbished. This work took four years in all, and was completed in 1992.{{cite news , title=Green light for Evergreen II , work =

Modern Railways ''Modern Railways'' is a monthly British magazine covering the rail transport industry, which was published by Ian Allan until March 2012 and Key Publishing since then. It has been published since 1962. The magazine was based originally in Shep ...

, location = London , date = February 2005 , page = 50

References

Rail infrastructure