OREANDA-NEWS. The wall, which is behind Sheffield station and next to the Supertram lines, has been repeatedly tarnished with graffiti over recent months with calls from passengers and residents for the area to be cleaned.

In a bid to help, the safety team held their monthly meeting at the site instead of in the office and spent the day cleaning off the paint and making the area look more attractive.

Graffiti is not only costly to remove, with Network Rail spending over ?3.5 million a year on cleaning it from railway structures across the country, but it can also pose a significant danger to those who trespass on the railway to carry out the crime.

Hayley Bull, community safety manager, said: “Graffiti is a problem on the railway and unfortunately this area near Sheffield station had become particularly bad. We decided to have our team meeting outside the normal office environment which meant we were still able to have all the conversations we needed to, while doing something that improves this part of the railway for those who live, work and visit Sheffield.”

Network Rail owns, manages and develops Britain's railway - the 20,000 miles of track, 40,000 bridges and viaducts and the thousands of signals, level crossings and stations (the largest of which we also run). In partnership with train operators we help people take more than 1.65bn journeys by rail every year and move hundreds of millions of tonnes of freight, saving almost 8m lorry journeys. We employ 36,000 people across Britain and work round-the-clock, each and every day, to provide a safe, reliable railway.

The Railway Upgrade Plan is Network Rail's investment plan for Britain's railways. It makes up two-thirds of Network Rail's £40bn spending priorities for the five years to 2019 and represents the biggest sustained programme of rail modernisation since the Victoria era. It is designed to provide more capacity, relieve crowding and respond to the tremendous growth Britain's railways continue to experience; passenger numbers have doubled in the past 20 years and are set to double again over the next 25 years - so we need to continue to invest in building a bigger, better railway. For passengers, that means:

    longer, faster more frequent trains;
    better, more reliable infrastructure; and
    better facilities for passengers, especially at stations.