Football mascots helped celebrate the first One train

Run by National Express, it combines services from the old Anglia, Great Eastern and West Anglia routes and includes the Stansted Express.

It provides services from Liverpool Street to Hertford, Cambridge, Peterborough, all Essex and to Norwich and east coast resorts.

The new franchise, brand-named One, promised cleaner, more reliable trains and station improvements costing �11m.

Rail chiefs launching the Greater Anglia franchise insisted that a damning report on the industry made it the "best possible day" for a new start.

The industry received a devastating critique from the Commons transport select committee which said the railways were out of effective control and suffering "chronic fragmentation".

The new franchise has been brand-named One

But Phil White, chief executive of National Express Group, said the new franchise would answer questions raised by the select committee's report.

The integration of a number of train services would make it "the best possible day to launch a new franchise as what we are doing today actually answers a lot of the select committee's questions", he told a news conference.

Rail lobby groups have claimed planned investment in the new Greater Anglia franchise is inadequate.

Previous UK rail franchises have included billions of pounds of investment in new rolling stock, stations and track.

But it is understood the Strategic Rail Authority (SRA) did not ask National Express to buy new trains or to make other large-scale investment in the Anglia contract.

Punctuality and reliability

The authority is believed to have told the company to focus instead on basics such as punctuality and reliability - using refurbished 20-year-old slam-door carriages.

An SRA spokesman refused to confirm whether or not it requested National Express to buy new rolling stock.

But he said the SRA did not want "to waste taxpayers' money by agreeing orders for new trains that are unnecessary".

"The focus is on short-term improvements - cleanliness and that sort of thing," he said.