A transport company has revealed plans to reduce delays on one of the busiest areas of railway in Britain.

Brighton Mainline goes through East Croydon Station and a series of junctions known as the “Selhurst triangle” which funnel trains to and from London stations.

These junctions create a bottleneck and, as a result, passengers on the Brighton Mainline experience 60 per cent more knock-on delays when an incident occurs than on the South West Mainline.

John Halsall, Network Rail’s route managing director for the South East, said: “For too long train performance on the Brighton Mainline has been below the level that commuters and other passengers expect and deserve.

“While a number of factors have contributed to these issues in recent years, the basic layout of our railway through the Croydon area, and the bottleneck it creates, means reliability won’t ever improve to acceptable levels without significant changes.”

The number of people using the line has more than doubled since 2000 and the annual number of passengers travelling through East Croydon Station is predicted to rise from 75 million in 2017 to 90 million in the early 2030s.

But, because of the bottleneck, there is no space to run more trains through the station and there are concerns that the rail services will not be able to cope with the increase in passengers.

To fix this, Network Rail has proposed an expansion to East Croydon Station with two additional platforms and tracks as well as an improvement of the track layouts surrounding the station, replacing existing junctions with new flyovers and dive-unders.

In a statement, a spokesman said: “As the main route connecting the capital with Gatwick Airport and the South Coast, improving the Brighton Mainline will provide a significant boost to the regional and national economy.

“More tracks and remodelled junctions also mean we would be able to speed up some services through the area.

Network Rail said that, after these issues had been addressed, it would then consider working with train operators to run more services to meet the predicted growth in demand.

A first public consultation was held in early November and communications discussing the plans are expected to last until mid-2020.

The proposed project aims to have a decision from the secretary of state by 2022, with work planned to start in 2023.