Services are set to return to normal tomorrow after the latest series of work, but from Good Friday through to today, buses have replaced trains as there have been no rail services from or to Northampton.

Rail users said they understood the reasons behind the move but still expressed frustration.

Network Rail has pledged there would be no repeat of its New Year engineering work fiasco where a similar operation resulted in the firm being fined £14m after work which should have taken four days ended up taking twice as long, causing travel chaos for passengers.

Shaun Hope, treasurer of the Northampton Rail Users Group, said: "Personally I wouldn't have travelled over the weekend.

"I can only hope the services are back to normal on Tuesday."

He said engineering work during bank holidays had become a regular feature, adding: "I hope the work is coming to an end. Perhaps Network Rail can tell us when it finally hopes to complete the upgrade, I don't actually know when that's going to be."

Signs were placed around the station advising people of the changes and extra staff were on duty to advise them on their journeys.

Over the Easter weekend more than 30 projects have been carried out, with 6,000 people working around 300,000 man-hours, laying new track, repairing bridges and updating signalling systems.

But the company's chief executive, Iain Coucher, has said he was "very confident" the work would be completed by tomorrow.

Andy Thomas, operations director of London Midland, which runs the West Coast Mainline service through Northampton, has said: "We are working closely with Network Rail and other organisations to keep disruption to a minimum but we apologise for the inevitable inconvenience."