MORE seats will be provided for Essex train users for the next two years.

National Express East Anglia has unveiled a new timetable starting from December 11, which will see 3,500 more seats on the Essex and Suffolk part of the Great Eastern mainline route.

It is the final stage of a service improvement plan it agreed with the Department for Transport.

Overall, it means an extra 11,000 seats on all services into London Liverpool Street.

Abellio Great Anglia says in addition to the seats offered by National Express East Anglia, it will add another 92 carriages when it takes over in February.

It will hold the franchise until the next review in July, 2014.

Additional trains from next month include extra early morning services from Colchester and Marks Tey to Liverpool Street.

However, Derek Monnery, chairman of Essex Rail Users’ Federation, is not convinced the changes will be for the better.

He said he understood National Express East Anglia would be using 25 trains which had previously run on the Stansted Express line before they were replaced with modernised ones.

Mr Monnery said another seven, used as maintenance spares, would be used in rotation.

He added: “What they are proposing is very risky, because what they are doing is relying on all the trains working all the time. If you have a 13-year-old car, it will not work all the time.”

Mr Monnery said he understood Abellio wanted to take the seven maintenance trains out of service, plus another two trains.

Andrew Chivers, managing director of National Express East Anglia, said: “The timetable improvements for our mainline route customers in Suffolk and Essex completes the £185million investment through our service improvement plan to increase seating capacity on our network in partnership with the Department for Transport, by providing 188 new and additional vehicles for East Anglia, including 120 new carriages on our Stansted Express and West Anglia route.

“These timetable improvements mean National Express East Anglia will be providing 11,000 more seats for our customers using services into London Liverpool Street on our West Anglia and Great Eastern mainline routes from December 2011, an increase of almost 20 per cent in the past year.”

An Abellio spokesman said: “There will be no reduction of services, with no changes to the December 2011 timetable and no increase in crowding.