A SHUTDOWN of the Greater Anglia line between Essex and London over the festive period will signal the start of three months of weekend misery for passengers.

Network Rail has announced a huge raft of maintenance work taking place up until the end of March, which will cause major disruption to users of the route.

From Christmas Eve until January 2, there will be no trains at all between Ingatestone or Billericay and Liverpool Street.

For the rest of January, normal services will run on Saturdays, but London-bound trains on Sundays will only run as far as Ingatestone, Billericay or Wickford.

The shutdown will take place on both Saturdays and Sundays in February, extending to the entire route between Southend Victoria and London from February 25 until the end of March.

Richard Schofield, Network Rail’s route managing director for Anglia, said: “To get a bigger and better railway, passengers have to experience the inconvenience and disruption that closing the railway causes.

“I’d like to thank passengers for their continued understanding and encourage them to check ahead of travelling to see how their journey might be affected.”

The closures will allow major improvement works, including overhead wire replacements and building a new platform, to take place at Shenfield.

Jamie Burles, managing director of Greater Anglia, said: “We need this work to be done at Shenfield in order to improve reliability and journey times on our Norwich to London route.

“We recognise that it is a major inconvenience to customers wanting to travel on this route at weekends when engineering is taking place, but ultimately it will make these journeys much better.

The Greater Anglia route is currently partway through an eight-week period of weekend line closures, which will come to an end in mid-November.

Replacement bus services will run for the duration of the upcoming upgrade works.

For more information, visit greateranglia.co.uk.