GREATER Anglia is to invest £10million on more cleaners, revamping waiting rooms and upgrading ticket gates.

The firm, which operates trains between Southend Victoria and London Liverpool Street via Shenfield and Brentwood, has announced a raft of improvements to start from January.

The improvements, which are in addition to £20million of investment announced earlier this year, comes after feedback from customers.

Jamie Burles, managing director of Greater Anglia, said: "We are totally committed to delivering a better service for our customers, focusing on those areas they prioritise as important.

“This extensive package of service improvements represents a major investment in key areas of service delivery including the on-train travelling environment, cleaning, seating capacity and performance.

“In a short term franchise we will now be investing over £30 million in customer-focused enhancements aimed at continuously improving the quality of the train service our passengers experience."

As part of the programme of works, Shenfield will get brand new automatic ticket gates, which Great Anglia say will be more efficient and enable the introduction of more mobile ticketing, print-at-home ticketing and future smart-ticketing schemes.

Shenfield will also be one of eight stations across the network to have wireless mobile public address systems installed to allow staff to make announcements whilst out on the platforms.

The new package comes after Greater Anglia’s franchise was extended until Octover 2016.

It is a 50 per cent increase in the investment in service upgrades it is already providing over that time and directly targets the issues that customers and stakeholders highlight as priorities - including on-train condition and cleaning, better performance, seating availability and crowding, customer information provision and easier ticket purchase and systems.