£45 million viaduct to ease Reading Rail chaos opens

Video of the first journey across Reading's new £45 million rail viaduct, completed on time by Network Rail and Balfour Beatty We spoke to Mark Hopwood, First Great Western, MD and Rob Wilson MP Reading East (Con)

One of the final and most complex stages of the £950 million redevelopment of Reading Station was completed today on time.

It was a major sigh of relief following the chaos earlier in the week caused by over-running engineering works on the line to Paddington which meant misery for many thousands of passengers.

The work has seen the completion of a flyover that will create three new lines into the station to ease the most congested part of the rail network in the country.

Separate work further down the line caused this weeks disruption.

For a decade the lines at Reading have been top of the list for causing delays because they can't cope with the number of trains using them.

There was no room to put extra tracks at ground level so they have gone in the air. Passenger trains from the south coast and all over the Thames Valley will benefit along with increasing amounts of freight traffic from Southampton Docks to the north.

Today the first trains ran over the radical new structure which is one of the most important since the line was built by Brunel and the first ran trains in 1838.

The new 2,000 metre viaduct, which cost £45m, removes a major bottleneck on the network by enabling trains to manoeuvre in and out of the Reading area without impeding each other – an operating achievement that has not been addressed since Brunel built the first layout in the 1840s.

The structure is part of the £895m Reading Redevelopment project which started in 2008 and implemented in phases. A new-look station with five extra platforms was officially opened by The Queen in July. The project is due for completion in Summer 2015.