Greater Anglia is heralding some of its best-ever reliability figures for services over the last month – including the InterCity route to London.

The company has announced that 93.07% of its services ran on schedule in April 2019, continuing an upward trend in punctuality since the beginning of the year.

The best performance was achieved on the Marks Tey - Sudbury branch line, followed by the Harwich line with 96.5%, and the London - Colchester / Clacton-on-Sea / Walton-on-the-Naze with 95.8%.

On the main Intercity line 92.6% of trains ran to time - well above the annual average of 85.9% which is now improving significantly.

The punctuality for the whole network was the best since September 2013, with performance of suburban trains on the Great Eastern Mainline from London to Essex and Suffolk hitting 95.8%

Jay Thompson, Greater Anglia train service delivery director, said: "We know how important a consistent, reliable service is for our customers so this is really great news for them.

"Many of our morning and evening peaks services are now regularly operating at 100% punctuality, which is great news for the thousands of commuters who travel with us every day.

"But there is still more we can do and we are carefully monitoring all of our services, looking at what causes every single minute of delay and how to prevent a similar delay another time."

Steve Hooker, Network Rail Anglia chief operating officer said: "We recently introduced a new performance improvement campaign called Every Second Counts, which focuses on the top eight causes of delay, and put aside a £10m booster fund to tackle these key areas."

Overall annual average punctuality across Greater Anglia is now 88.1% - higher than the national average of 86.1%.

The train operator is aiming to raise that figure to 90% and then 93% by the end of its franchise.

These figures for April were published just days before Greater Anglia's new timetable starts on Sunday, which includes the franchise commitment of two trains a day in each direction that complete the journey from Norwich and London in 90 minutes and from Ipswich in 60 minutes.