DETAILED plans to improve the Borders Railway have been unveiled as part of a nationwide £5 billion performance plan.

Since the track's reopening last year it has come in for heavy criticism over the amount of cancellations.

Problems with over-crowding and tardiness have also been raised regularly.

The Border Telegraph reported last month, during the Border Railway's first anniversary celebrations in Edinburgh, that transport minister Humza Yousef was demanding improvements.

And today the ScotRail Alliance responded by publishing its plans.

As well as replacing and refurbishing engines, and making improvements to signalling and points on the 35 miles line, they will carry out a full review of the Borders Railway timetable.

And they have vowed to increase capacity on the £350 million line by 33 per cent within the next three years.

ScotRail Alliance infrastructure director David Dickson said: “Our railway is undergoing the biggest period of change and modernisation since the Victorian era.

"Over the course of the next year or so we will be completing huge projects to upgrade our infrastructure, electrifying large parts of the network and introducing new fleets of faster, longer greener and intercity trains.

“All of this work will transform rail travel in Scotland.

"We will have shorter journey times, better equipped trains and, crucially, a huge expansion in the number of services we run and the seats we are able to offer.

"When we complete this work, there will be a hundred thousand more seats available each and every weekday than there was at the start of the current Franchise."

The latest published figures for reliability - from August 21 to September 17 - show that only 41 per cent of trains on the Borders Railway ran on time.

As well as unreliable engines, staff shortages have also been blamed for the cancellations and tardiness.

Part of the Performance Improvement Plan will see a review of current methods of rostering staff undertaken to cut down on ‘train crew unavailable’.

Mr Dickson added: "We have been looking at every aspect of how we work in order to assess what we can do to make things better.

"This has involved looking at how we operate our timetables, at which trains have the greatest impact if they are disrupted and at how our people are working.

"One of the biggest concerns that customers express to me is one of capacity.

"We will add an extra 200 carriages to our network over the next two years – an increase of over 20 per cent.

"It also means that we can cascade our fleets to other parts of the country. This will allow us to revolutionise rail travel across all of our routes in Scotland.

"By 2019 capacity in the Borders will be increased by 33 per cent."

Scotland's railways are more popular than ever before with 95.5 million journeys made during 2015-16, up by a third in less than a decade.

And the planned improvements across the network have been welcomed by the transport minister.

Mr Yousaf told us: " We recognise the pressure this continuing popularity places on some services, most notably during the peak, which is why we are investing the record sum of £5 billion up to 2019 to ensure our railway can keep pace with demand.

“We are completely committed to help ScotRail deliver a service that has value for money and reliable, comfortable and punctual services at its core.

"We accept that in order to deliver the major and ambitious infrastructure enhancements planned for the rail network and ScotRail fleets in the coming years there will be some short-term challenges.

“I have seen some of the work that has gone into developing this Plan which sets out the actions that ScotRail will take over the short, medium and longer term to improve performance and the journey experience across the rail network.

"I know passengers want to see services in Scotland they can rely on and I have asked Transport Scotland to monitor the actions to ensure each initiative is being progressed and delivered to address these matters."