Government claims that hundreds of millions of pounds of rail investment were cancelled last July because there were other ways of delivering improvements have been rejected by the government spending watchdog.

In fact, the plans to modernise the line from Cardiff to Swansea, the Midland mainline and tracks in the Lake District were dropped after Network Rail spent huge sums on engineering works, said a report by the National Audit Office.

Chris Grayling, the transport secretary, slipped the announcement of the cancellations out last summer in a written statement as parliament prepared for the summer recess.

“New bi-mode train technology offers seamless transfer from diesel power to electric that is undetectable to passengers,” Grayling said at the time. “This means that we no longer need to electrify every line to achieve the same significant improvements to journeys, and we will only electrify lines where it delivers a genuine benefit to passengers.”

“Modern bi-mode trains” meant there was no need to put up with “disruptive electrification works” and “intrusive wires and masts”, he added.

The NAO investigation found that the reasons for the cancellations had been purely financial after costs had escalated and Network Rail’s capacity to borrow had been limited because it was redefined as a public body.



The plans were abandoned even though electrification of the Midland mainline to Sheffield had been a 2015 Conservative party manifesto commitment. The 2015 manifesto also stated that work was under way to electrify the railway in south Wales.

In 2012, when he announced the £38bn programme, David Cameron declared that it was the biggest investment since the Victorian era. Network Rail’s electrification works around the country, most notably on the Great Western mainline from London to Swansea, which started in 2014, were originally described as a vital upgrade that would bring cleaner, faster and more reliable services for passengers.

But by 2015 it was already clear the upgrading would cost much more than anticipated. The NAO report established that Network Rail ranked all the projects according to how far advanced they were, how much had already been spent and what the “reputational harm” of cancellation would be.

There was fury in the Midlands and South Yorkshire when it was announced that electrification of the line from Kettering to Sheffield had been abandoned on the grounds that HS2 would offer a quicker service and that the introduction of bi-mode trains had made electrification unnecessary. Bi-mode trains are still in development, and the NAO concludes they will have higher running costs and be less green than an electrified system.

The leader of the Aslef rail union, Mick Whelan, said that the NAO report showed Grayling had “lied”. “The truth is that the government didn’t want to find the money and made up a story about ‘sudden improvements’ using ‘state-of-the-art bi-mode trains’,” he said. “It’s a fantasy, an exercise in smoke and mirrors, to disguise the truth, and Mr Grayling has been rumbled.”