Network Rail boss Mark Carne is likely to rake in tens of thousands of pounds in his annual performance-related bonus despite the Christmas misery passengers endured this year.

Mr Carne is entitled to a whopping extra 20 per cent of his £675,000 salary if Network Rail performs well — amounting to £135,000.

Overrunning engineering works and poor weather caused massive Yuletide delays for services around Britain.

Mr Carne apologised for the delays, saying he’d set up an internal review of what went wrong, while urging an industry-wide probe into the timing of big engineering works.

But pressed during an interview on BBC Radio 4’s World at One, he said that the maximum he was likely to get would be 5 per cent — a bonus of nearly £34,000, more than £7,000 above the average yearly salary in Britain for 2014.

Shadow transport secretary Michael Dugher said he’d written to Mr Carne urging him not to take his full bonus and called yesterday for restrictions to the NR chief’s bonus after the disastrous management of the works during the holiday period.

“Following the misery that passengers have faced in recent days, it is understandable that questions are being raised about the prospect of NR executives receiving large bonuses,” said Mr Dugher.

“The public would no doubt find it perverse and indefensible if the people responsible for the poor performance of NR and the failings we’ve seen in the last few days then get rewarded with bumper bonuses.”

To add to many commuters’ chagrin, Friday will see rail season tickets increase in price by no less than 2.5 per cent.