Remember the rather dramatic photos of the storm that hit the Cornish coast and took out part of the main railway line at Dawlish?
DAWLISH, UNITED KINGDOM – FEBRUARY 05: Railway workers inspect the main Exeter to Plymouth railway line that has been closed due to parts of it being washed away by the sea at Dawlish on February 5, 2014 in Devon, England. With high tides combined with gale force winds and further heavy rain, some parts of the UK are bracing themselves for more flooding. (Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images)
The effort to restore the sea wall and the railway line is going well, with a hoped-for re-opening date of 4 April:
Haberfield reckons there are two premier construction jobs in the world at the moment – the race to finish the football World Cup stadiums in Brazil and this one, the repairs to the train line that hugs the Devon coast at Dawlish after the devastation of the great storm of 4 and 5 February. “You’ll always be able to look back at this and say you were there and you helped fix it,” he says.
Haberfield is a member of the 1,000-strong “orange army” that has been working night and day to fix the hole, the 100-metre breach in a section of sea wall that supported the mainline track from London to the far south-west of Britain — and dozens of other less spectacular but nonetheless tricky breaks along a 3.7-mile stretch.
Network Rail (NR), the owner and operator of Britain’s railway infrastructure, has announced that it is expecting the line to re-open on 4 April — a huge relief to residents and business people whose lives have been disrupted by the break in the line and a vital boost for the region’s tourism industry before the Easter holidays.
The repair work to the line, which is costing around £15m, has been a triumph for imaginative thinking and teamwork. In the early days the first job was making sure that another Atlantic storm heading Devon’s way did not cause more damage to the main breach. One early idea was to rush in a rail-mounted concrete spraying machine that had been specially built to repair a tunnel in Devon and was standing idle. It shored up the sea wall, prevent further devastation and may have helped save houses that were teetering on the edge.
Another was the decision to drop a row of shipping containers in front of the seawall, each filled with 70 tonnes of rubble, to act as a temporary breakwater as more bad weather came in.
DAWLISH, UNITED KINGDOM – FEBRUARY 05: Waves crash against the seafront and the railway station that has been closed due to storm damage at Dawlish on February 5, 2014 in Devon, England. With high tides combined with gale force winds and further heavy rain, some parts of the UK are bracing themselves for more flooding. (Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images)
