Greater Anglia's new £1.4 billion trains

In the heart of the Swiss countryside lies the small village of Bussnang. Just 2000 people live here, the views dotted with dairy farms and vineyards.

Perhaps incongruously it is also home to Swiss train manufacturer Stadler.

Stadler employs 8,000 people worldwide, 1,000 of whom work in the Bussnang factory. 58 of Greater Anglia's 169 new trains are being built here.

Stadler shares the contract to replace the entire Greater Anglia fleet with UK train manufacturer Bombardier. It is Stadler's first train contract for the UK, but it is also working on trams for the Croydon and Sheffield network and the Glasgow metro.

Inside the Bussnang factory work has already started on the third Greater Anglia train. Doors and windows are lifted into place, the red, white and grey livery is painted on.

In total Stadler and Bombardier are making over 1000 carriages, to replace every single train on the Greater Anglia network by 2020.

It is the first train company in the UK ever to replace its entire fleet. Costing around £10 million to build each new train, the total investment is £1.4 billion pounds.

At the moment it takes around 1hr 45 minutes to get from Norwich to London, with between 500-600 seats per train. Once the new trains are introduced that journey time is expected to go down to 90 minutes with up to 220 extra seats per train.

But the 'Norwich in 90' claim only relates to four trains a day. With timetables yet to be announced for 2019/2020, Greater Anglia says the trains will not stop at every station along the route, but cannot be drawn on which stops will have to be sacrificed to hit the 90 minute target.

Greater Anglia says it is also reducing journey time by the efficiency of the new train itself - despite having the same top speed of 100mph it accelerates and decelerates faster. The company claims even the smoother opening and closing of the doors shaves minutes off that commuter journey.

All routes across the Greater Anglia network will see their number of seats increase by around 30% following the introduction of the new trains. Greater Anglia says at the heart of this transformation is customer satisfaction - it claims over a thousand people took part in a consultation which influenced the design of the trains: comfy seats, WiFi and power sockets at every seat.

But top of the list for most commuters is punctuality. Currently punctuality for Greater Anglia runs at around 88%, by the time its contract runs out in 2025 it hopes to have reached 91-92%.

Greater Anglia claims punctuality will increase as the new trains will be more reliable, and the faster acceleration and deceleration will allow drivers to catch up on any minor delays.

However industry experts are warning the new trains can only be as good as the tracks they run upon. The limiting factor to these top of the range modern trains may ultimately be the country's rail infrastructure.

Greater Anglia says it is working closely with Network Rail and that Network Rail is investing a huge amount of money into the Anglia region to renew all the overhead lines. The company says it is confident that there is enough investment from Network Rail to bring the infrastructure up to a standard that will support its new trains.

The roll-out of the new Stadler trains will begin in May 2019. First to see them will be one of the rural routes, as yet to be announced (Marks Tey to Sudbury, Norwich to Sheringham, Great Yarmouth, Lowestoft and Cambridge, and Ipswich to Felixstowe, Lowestoft, Cambridge and Peterborough), then the Stansted Express service and then the Norwich to London intercity route. The 111 Bombardier trains will follow on the remaining routes (commuter routes into London Liverpool Street from Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire). The entire fleet is expected to be in operation by the end of 2020.