The director of the agency behind the new £165 million regeneration project at Leeds City Station has tried to allay fears that it will cause major disruptions to passengers in Wharfedale, writes Nicholas Towle.

Nicholas Pollard, director of Railtrack London North Eastern, said the introduction of the temporary platform at Whitehall "was critical to our plans for ensuring it will, as much as possible, be business as usual at the station while the Leeds First scheme is underway."

The £500,000 platform comes into service from this Sunday,

initially for Manchester Airport services between midnight and 5am.

He added: "Train timetables between now and the completion of Leeds First are being carefully designed to keep passengers on the move at all times, while ensuring that we complete this massive feat of engineering with as little impact as possible.

"The added bonus is that once the Whitehall platform and accompanying passenger facilities have done their job we can dismantle and install them elsewhere in West Yorkshire to help meet future aspirations for more stations on key commuter routes."

Passenger disruption would be kept to a minimum by the provision of shuttle buses transporting rail users from the Whitehall platform to the railway station.

Meanwhile, from today, thousands of Leeds City Station users will get the chance to see a scale model - 200 times smaller than its real-life 'big brother' - of how the station will look after the completion of the Leeds First project in December 2001.

The detailed replica will take pride of place at the centre of the Leeds First exhibition, which was installed in the North Concourse in July.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.