Updated: RAIL passengers from York are to get an extra ten trains a day to London and Edinburgh under a ground-breaking new timetable for the East Coast Main Line.

The average journey time to the English capital will also be cut by ten minutes to one hour and 50 minutes, Transport Secretary Lord Adonis has revealed.

But most northbound trains will stop at Edinburgh instead of Glasgow under the timetable, with services between the two Scottish cities transferred to Cross Country.

Meanwhile, the minister has still not given any guarantee that the route’s headquarters will remain in York when a new franchisee is found to take over the service next year from the current operator, the nationalised company East Coast.

Asked whether keeping the HQ – and 100 jobs – in the city would be made a condition of the franchise, as demanded by politicians including York MP Hugh Bayley, he said a decision had not yet been made, but he did not rule it out.

He said those bidding for the franchise would have to promise better stations, improved catering and simpler ticketing, as well as faster services, and urged City of York Council leaders to tell the Government what improvements they would like to see at York Station.

An East Coast spokesman said that the new timetable, dubbed Eureka!, was planned to come into operation on May 22 next year, but the company would launch a consultation on February 1.

He said Eureka! had been in development by the rail industry for more than a decade and would add thousands of seats, provide new services, speed up average journey times, improve connections, and make better use of available track space. “This will provide much-needed new capacity to accommodate the extra customers predicted to travel by rail over the next decade.”

The extra ten trains would increase the total number each weekday from the existing 60 to more than 70. A new “clock face” timetable would also make it easier for customers to become familiar with the new timetable.

East Coast chairwoman Elaine Holt said: “Eureka! has been a long time in the making – and represents the biggest change on the East Coast Main Line since electrification in 1991 – and we welcome the fact that we’re now closer than ever to this new approach becoming a reality.”

The spokesman said that with the transfer of most Edinburgh to Glasgow services from East Coast to Cross Country, a new direct rail service could be created between Glasgow/ Motherwell, and the north-east of England, Yorkshire and the Midlands, via York, Leeds and the East Midlands.