Greater Anglia says it is hoping to get it services back to where they were in the early autumn when passengers said they were becoming more satisfied with their journeys.

Overall satisfaction among rail passengers on the Greater Anglia network during the autumn reached 81%, according to the National Rail Passenger Survey - an increase of eight percentage points compared to Autumn 2018.

But the period ended before Greater Anglia started suffering from signalling problems with its new trains - and the software issues that are still causing issues on some journeys.

During the autumn general customer satisfaction with punctuality/reliability saw one of the highest increases - up 11 points to 82%.

Peak-time customers were much happier with the usefulness of information on trains about delays (up 28), punctuality/reliability and availability of seating at stations (both up 11) compared to Autumn 2018. In general, 75% of peak-time passengers were satisfied, up 9% compared to the previous year.

Jamie Burles, Greater Anglia managing director, acknowledged that while the autumn results were good, there had been serious issues over the last two months: "We're working hard to improve every aspect of the railway in our region, including punctuality, how we deal with delays and increasing the frequency of services.

"We are committed to providing a reliable service more and more consistently, avoiding the type of disruptive period we recently experienced on our regional routes, for which we apologise sincerely.

"It's very pleasing to get results like this from an independent survey of our customers, but we are determined to do even better. We've also invested in enhancing our stations, with better facilities, new ticket machines and £25 million of car park improvements.

"We now have new trains on all of our rural routes and the roll-out is continuing on our intercity route, with all the new intercity trains due in service by Easter. This spring our new electric suburban trains are due to start entering passenger service on some of our busy commuter routes in Essex.

"We believe customers will start to see a further positive step change in service standards in the months ahead."