If the Queen happened to take a glance out of her carriage window as the Royal train trundled towards Bradford, these are some of the sights that would have greeted her.

Pictures taken an hour before the Royal visit showed that car tyres, beer barrels, industrial containers and a shopping trolley were among the piles of rubbish that still blighted the rail line between Bradford Interchange and New Pudsey.

On Wednesday, the T&A revealed that Network Rail, which is responsible for tracks and embankments, had ordered a blitz on graffiti and fly-tipping on the way into Bradford before the Royal visit.

The company pledged to spend £5,000 in the immediate area around the Interchange before the visit and a further £20,000 on the line to New Pudsey afterwards.

Today, Network Rail came in for fierce criticism when it was revealed that much of the rubbish dumped along the route was not cleared prior to Thursday's visit.

But the company has hit back, saying the Council provided "very short notice" of the Royal visit, giving it nowhere near enough time to clean up the entire route.

Councillor Anne Hawkesworth, the Council's head of environment, said she was "astonished" that so much litter was still strewn across the embankments near the line.

She said: "We have tried to get them to take notice of our requests to clean up the line and we have been asking them for some time.

"It's about time they got on with it because it's their responsibility.

"When they are boasting that they are going to clean it up because the Queen is coming, they really should do it."

But a Network Rail spokesman said: "We have not finished. We got a call from the Council last week asking us to do it. We did not have enough time because we had very short notice that there was an important visit and could not do the whole stretch."

Network Rail said the Council had asked the company to do what it could before the visit. The spokesman said: "We targeted the immediate area around the station which is the most sensitive because that's where the train is slowing down."

The spokesman said the rest of the route to New Pudsey would be cleaned up in the next month and insisted that it was not just the Queen's visit that had prompted the work.

Network Rail said it spent millions of pounds a year on a rotating programme to clean miles and miles of track of graffiti and fly-tipping.

Bradford Councillor Stanley King, chairman of the West Yorkshire Passenger Transport Authority, said it was disappointing but predictable that the whole route had not been cleaned before the Royal party's arrival. He said: "I appreciate the magnitude of the task and I imagine they were overwhelmed by the volume of rubbish along the route and problems accessing it.

"They would probably have needed 50 or 60 people to clear it all up in that short time-scale."

He said the reality of working at cut-off locations near railways made rubbish clearance a difficult, time-consuming and dangerous job.

Coun King added that the issue of fly-tipping was not just a problem for Network Rail, but a problem for society in general.

He said: "It's something I detest. There's no need for it, but people think it's a case of out of sight, out of mind'.

"There are refuse collections for this kind of thing and people should just pick up the phone instead of dumping it."

Councillor Andrew Mallinson, the Council's executive member for regeneration, said it was vital that structures were put in place to maintain and clean gateway transport routes into the district.

He said: "As a Council, we do our best to keep the district clean and it's about time Network Rail was a willing partner. What we need to see is a very clear programme of works that they are going to carry out - not just for special visits.

"When are they going to raise their standards because we are talking about gateway corridors for the local community and visitors at the same time?

"What's their investment plan for the coming years to keep the lines clean? I don't think they see it as a priority in their work plan, but we need more openness about why they can't do the standards that we would all like."

The issue of fly-tipping and littering near railway lines has provoked a reaction from readers, with no fewer than 52 people responding on our website to the story about the clean-up.

One reader said it was good that the Royal visit seemed to have stimulated a clean-up, while another said it would have been easier to bring the Queen to Bradford via the "cleaner" Forster Square route.

One concerned reader said he hoped the Welcome Home Sexy' graffiti would not be removed as part of the clean-up, while another questioned why graffiti was being removed at all, saying: "All urban rail lines in the country have graffiti. They won't be removing it from London's trackside as there is far too much, so she'll see it there anyway."