Passengers in the North promised faster journeys as £3.9bn is announced for major rail upgrade

The Transpennine Route Upgrade (TRU) is due to increase capacity on the 76-mile line, allowing eight more trains to run each hour, and cut journey times for passengers.

Workers are electrifying the line, building new tracks, installing digital signalling equipment and upgrading stations.

Mr Merriman said the Government has agreed to provide £6.9bn so far, but it expects the project to cost £11.5bn in total and be completed by 2033.

He announced the second tranche of funding during a visit to Ravensthorpe, where a four-track viaduct will be built to relieve congestion on a section of the line which has become a bottleneck.

“It will allow us to run more trains and, crucially, allow faster trains to operate alongside those that stop at every station,” he said.

“We should be able to reduce journey times from Manchester to Leeds from 55 minutes down to 41 minutes with this investment.”

He added: “We recognise that services in the North have not been good enough. The only way you really improve that is with mass infrastructure projects.”

He said the project, first announced in 2011, offers “huge benefits” to passengers but the additional capacity will also allow businesses to transport more freight across the North of England.

Passengers travelling along this route are facing disruption this week, as train drivers are refusing to work overtime and planning to stage a strike on Friday that will prevent TransPennine Express and Northern from running any services, as part of a row over pay.

Mr Merriman the government has put a new deal on the table, that would see drivers earn £65,000 for a four-day week, but the trade union Aslef has not put it to their members for a vote.

Henri Murison, Chief Executive of Northern Powerhouse Partnership lobby group, welcomed the investment in the TRU but said the East Coast Mainline also needs to be upgraded north of York, as that will allow more trains from Manchester to run to Newcastle.

“These eight trains an hour across the Pennines will practically and rightly need to carry on beyond just Leeds where there is not enough spare capacity to terminate,” he said.

Mr Merriman said “there is a plan” for a £3.5bn investment to increase capacity on the East Coast Mainline, but it has not been signed off.

It comes after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak scrapped the northern leg of HS2 in October and spend £36bn on hundreds of other transport projects.

There are also plans to build around 40 miles of high-speed rail lines between Warrington and Marsden and electrify existing lines across the north, from Liverpool to Hull, as part of a separate project known as Northern Powerhouse Rail. But no timeline or budget has been set yet.

The Government has been accused of mismanaging major rail projects in recent years and causing costs to balloon by changing the plans and delaying construction.

Last year, the National Audit Office said the government had “taken too long” to make key decisions about the TRU, “repeatedly altered” the plans since work began in 2015 and wasted £190m on designs that were scrapped.

There are long-standing issues with overcrowding and poor reliability on the line, which reached full capacity in 2019 when less than 40 per cent of trains ran on time.