NETWORK Rail's plan to cut its maintenance budget by £5bn will compromise safety and could lead to services being scrapped, unions warned last night.

The successor to Railtrack said it was to spend £24.5bn over the next five years, compared with the £29.5bn previously envisaged, after being ordered to make savings by rail regulator Tom Winsor.

Some track replacement work will be deferred by two years under the revised spending plans, while any further budget cuts are likely to mean failure to meet the decade-end target of getting 90 per cent of trains running on time.

Rail chiefs aim to invest more money on maintaining heavily used inter-city routes, such as the East Coast Mainline and the Transpennine Express, at the expense of less congested rural and freight routes.

Stan Herschel, North-East regional organiser with the Rail Maritime and Transport Workers' Union, warned last night that budget cuts were compromising safety and could lead to some services being axed if lines were allowed to deteriorate.

The Strategic Rail Authority (SRA) has said that 100 services across the country were to go to improve punctuality.

Mr Herschel said: "They are running down the rural railways in a more savage way than Beeching did.

"It is absolutely scandalous. Inevitably someone will come up with the bright idea that because they are under-used, there is no point in keeping them."

Ernie Preston, secretary of the North-East Rail Passengers' Committee, said: "It would be sensible for very clear maintenance standards to be established, appropriate for different kinds of railway line, but the SRA must still ensure the long-term integrity of any structures on it.

"To simply defer maintenance indefinitely and allow things to get slowly into worse and worse nick would be a serious mistake."