Passengers face west coast main line travel misery RAIL passengers face yet more major disruption on the Scotland to London west coast main line because of improvement work originally planned as part of its £9 billion upgrade a decade ago. Travellers, who have suffered years of delays and replacement buses during the massive rebuild, face hold-ups when part of the route is shut five times from May - for up to two weeks at a time. The work, which will continue for nearly a year, comes amid concern that the shelving of other improvements from the original project are making train delays worse when there are problems on the increasingly busy line. The reliability of Virgin Trains" services between Glasgow, Edinburgh and London is said to be getting so bad that business passengers who were lured on to rail by faster journeys are switching back to air. The latest punctuality figures show that fewer than half of Virgin's trains arrived on time in the year to 17 August, while nearly one in five were more than ten minutes late - the worst performance in Britain. Virgin Trains chief executive Tony Collins said: "There is still a pressing need for investment along the corridor. If we want to continue the phenomenal growth in passenger numbers we've achieved since taking over the west coast franchise in 1997, we have to deliver better reliability and further accelerate journey times. We shouldn't be sitting on our hands and waiting for HS2 to deliver improvements, we should be investing now.