At Botley in Hampshire, where the largest of three landslips occurred on 1st February, work to rebuild 80-metres of railway is well advanced. A team of 100 has been working round the clock.
More than 2km of new road has had to be built just to access the sites and more than 1,000 lorry movements will be needed to transport the 20,000 tonnes of new material needed to rebuild the line.
The 15m-high embankment at Botley that collapsed was originally constructed in the 1840s out of a local sourced mixture of clay, sand and silt. Persistent heavy rainfall during the wettest winter in 250 years caused the embankment to become unstable, ultimately suffering a rotational failure, where the land to the south of the line raised up, as the embankment sunk down. It is now being completely dug out and replaced with new material, supported by a 100-metre wall of sheet piles that have been sunk into the ground along both sides and tied together with steel rods (below).
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The aim is to get the line, which links Fareham with Eastleigh, back in use by mid-March.
Rail minister Stephen Hammond visited the team on site to see the scale of the damage. He said: "The work Network Rail has been carrying out to reopen the line around Botley by mid-March has been impressive. They undertook a massive engineering task just to prepare the site before they could start dealing with three separate landslips along one mile of track. Lessons are being learned from the extreme weather and I've asked Network Rail to examine how the network can be made more resilient in future."
Elsewhere, work is on target to complete work to rebuild three collapsed sections of railway in Sussex by next Monday (3 March). Landslips at Stonegate, Whatlington and Battle have meant a month of disruption for passengers on the line from Hastings to Tonbridge, with buses replacing trains on a section of the route between Wadhurst and Battle. After four weeks of round-the-clock working, Network Rail has repaired the slips to the extent that trains will be able to run along the whole length of the route from the start of service on Monday morning.
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