INTER-city trains between York and Manchester could be the first in Britain to be digitally controlled, it was announced yesterday.

Mr Grayling, who has been accused of starving the North of transport investment, told business leadershe wanted to give the region "the newest, best, smartest technology".

He has earmarked £5 million of funding for Network Rail to develop plans for digital signalling on the line between Manchester and York in a bid to increase capacity and reliability.

Network Rail's Rail Operating Centre (ROC) in York deals with signalling for trains all over the country, but a spokesman said yesterday it was too early to tell whether work there would be affected by the digital technology.

The project is at a theoretical phase - looking at how much faster or more efficient a service could be run with digital signalling - he added.

The will come from a £450 million fund for digital railway development announced in the Autumn Statement last year.

Digital signalling is used on sections of the London Underground, allowing trains to run closer together.

At the event in Manchester, Mr Grayling said: "This means that the Transpennine route could be Britain's first digitally controlled inter-city main line railway.

"My goal is simple. I want to put the passenger first, and use the newest, best, smartest technology to disrupt their lives as little as possible."

The transport secretary faced a barrage of criticism in the summer after announcing Government backing for multi-billion pound investments for London and the south east amid cuts for the north. He hit back at those criticisms today, questioning numbers and saying that after  after "decades of under-investment" he was "baffled" by his Labour critics, who he took with a pinch of salt.

Mr Grayling also took aim at the media and think tank the Institute of Public Policy Research (North) which claimed spending per head was vastly higher in the south.

He said: "I want to slay some of the myths around this. Some of the stuff that's been said in the last months is absolutely not true.

"You have been hearing about us spending more in the south than the north. I want to take that head on. The figures you have heard completely misunderstands the nature of spending and the nature of the figures."

Mr Grayling said when local transport schemes were taken into account spending per person was actually higher in the north west than the south east.

However Ed Cox, director of IPPR North, said it stood by its research and Mr Grayling was simply wrong on the facts and it was unclear where he had obtained his figures.

Mr Cox said using the Government's own figures, if the North had received the same funding as London over the past 10 years, the region would have received £10 billion more and there was a £1,500 spending "gap", with £1,900 of government spending per head in London, compared with £400 per head in the North.

He added: "He's wrong. He's actually wrong about historical spending.
"Mr Grayling needs to be more specific about what he's referring to.

"If there is so much discussion around this, we would be happy for this matter to be referred to the Office for National Statistics."

Mr Grayling also repeated, twice, that no announcement or decision had been made about electrification of the Transpennine route but went on to say "hybrid cars"' were now running on the roads and new technology meant "hybrid trains" could provide solutions.

He said: "'Let me give you one statistic on that. Since 2010 at a time of financial challenge, we have electrified something like four times as many miles of railway in the north west as the last government did in 13 years across the entire country.

"We have launched the biggest modernisation programme of railways in the north since the steam age."