Patience is "wearing thin" say Suffolk councillors as the wait goes on for crucial rail upgrades worth up to £20m.

A motion to Suffolk County Council on Thursday was passed calling for Network Rail to begin work immediately on the Haughley Junction after it is signed off by the Department for Transport.

Cllr Richard Smith, Conservative cabinet member for economic development, transport strategy and waste, said it is crucial to the future freight movements from the Port of Felixstowe as Freeport East, will take lorries off the roads and aid the county’s continuing economic development.

He said the junction “lacks the capacity to enable more freight to be sent through it by train, and we need to tackle that for the future”.

“The layout of the junction is acknowledged by all as far from perfect, and needs to be realigned,” he said.

“But nothing has happened. And nothing has happened despite the sweetener of £1m towards costs promised by the Suffolk Public Sector Leaders group as acknowledgement of this proposal’s importance and as a financial encouragement to make it happen.

“Yes there have been delays in planning during the Covid crisis, but the time to action this fairly modest project should be now.

“Suffolk people are patient people but our patience is wearing thin."

Cllr Smith said that there were “some three dozen container trains” leaving the Port of Felixstowe each day which were “preventing many hundreds of HGV movements on our busy roads”.

The decision on the scheme lies with the DfT after a shake-up of the rail industry during Covid-19 meant decision on schemes like Haughley Junction were taken back in-house by the DfT rather than Network Rail.

The scheme plans to upgrade the single-track junction to a two-track layout that will help ease the bottleneck of freight.

Andrew Stringer, division councillor and leader of the opposition Green, Liberal Democrat and Independent group, said: "The works at Haughley are quite difficult to carry out, one being the reason of geography.

“Suffolk is incredibly flat but the railway is actually in a cutting.”

He added that “any investment in railways is a very, very good thing if it gets freight off the roads” but said that as the line is not electrified it would effectively move diesel emission from the A14 to the line, albeit with diesel locomotives being less of a polluter than diesel HGVs.

Sandy Martin from the Labour group said it would help reduce congestion on the county’s roads and is an “essential step to deal with the climate crisis”.