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Climate change poses challenge to UK’s aging rail lines

In the seaside town of Dawlish in southwest England, engineers are working day and night to protect the 175-year-old railway from today’s threat of climate change.

The waves of the English Channel crashed into the sea wall of the line built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, one of the leading civil engineers of the Victorian era, making this stretch particularly vulnerable. In 2014, part of a railway line, connecting London with Penzance in Cornwall, was washed away by a massive storm.

Seven years on, teams of structural engineers are back, waiting for the tide, as they replace dilapidated infrastructure. The new wall, made of concrete slabs eight meters high, is designed to protect Dawlish station and the track for the next 100 years.

The new coastal defenses, built to withstand a one meter sea level rise, are a stark testament to how large parts of the UK’s rail network were first built in 19th century by Victorian entrepreneurs, are increasingly threatened by climate change. .

Britain was a pioneer in railways, playing an important role in the industrial revolution. But age is now the enemy of the network. Trains still travel on routes laid out from the 1830s onwards against mainland Europe, where many railway lines were rebuilt after the second world war.

Construction of a new sea wall at Dawlish station in 2021 © Peter Titmuss / Alamy

Heritage is a network not designed to handle rapidly changing weather patterns. In particular, 19th-century planners tried to buy as little land as possible to save money when they built the track, which means that narrow cuttings with steep edges are now very susceptible to flooding.

According to Network Rail, the state-owned infrastructure operator, the cost of weather-related delays on UK rail lines has risen steadily over the past decade, from £45 million in the year 2009-10 to around £100 million in 2019-20, according to Network Rail.

Severe weather can damage railway tracks, many old bridges and tunnels, and networks of tens of thousands of ridges and embankments.

“Patterns are individual events that are getting more frequent and more intensive,” said Martin Frobisher, director of engineering and safety at Network Rail. “We break weather records every year. . . and each of those extreme weather has an impact on the railroads.”

However, Network Rail faces a lot of uncertainty about future state funding: ministers have pushed for spending cuts affecting some upgrades and proposed rail links new, especially in the north of England.

Tony Travers, a transport expert at the London School of Economics, warned that preparing the network to respond to climate change would “cost a significant amount”, adding: “It is not clear that this is available. .”

Under the existing five-year funding settlement that runs until 2024, Network Rail plans to spend £500 million on mitigating extreme weather events. Frobisher said it plans to allocate more money to keep the earthworks and drainage going over the next five years.

A major storm caused severe damage to the track at Dawlish in February 2014 © Ben Birchall/PA

It is financially incentivized to tackle climate change because it has to compensate train operators for disrupted weather. When the goods in Dawlish are badly damaged in 2014, Network Rail paid out £16 million in damages.

Rail operators have warned the problems facing the network will only get worse in the coming decades as extreme weather events become more common.

Network Rail concluded that “the impact of extreme weather and climate change [was] According to a 2018 report by the National Audit Office, the agency that oversees government spending, acceleration was faster than planned assumptions.

“This is a risk for the rail industry going forward, this is a risk that the industry is aware of and when you know about it,” said Malcolm Brown, chief executive officer of Angel Trains, the lead company. , you can start doing everything about it.” rental company, and is the chairman of the cross-industry lobby group Sustainable Rail Executive.

Network Rail has turned to new technology to monitor rails and other infrastructure, using drones and artificial intelligence to sift through mountains of data collected by train-mounted cameras. fire. It is also working with the Met Office to try to better predict sections of roads that could be at risk during storms.

Three people were killed after a train derailed in north-east Scotland in August 2020 following heavy rain © Derek Ironside/Newsline/PA

“We see a shift from traditional maintenance to predictive maintenance programs that rely more on digital technology,” said Nicola Sandri, global transportation infrastructure lead at McKinsey.

Rail safety experts have warned that the UK cannot avoid catastrophic floods in Germany and Belgium last summer, which killed nearly 200 people and caused an estimated 1.3 billion in damage. euro for railway. Flooding damaged 180 overpasses, more than 50 bridges and more than 1,000 signal and power poles.

Three people have been killed after a train derailed in north-east Scotland in August 2020 following heavy rain, the first fatal rail crash in the UK in more than a decade.

While the industry is still waiting for the full findings of the crash from accident investigators, a report on climate change by the Railroad Safety and Standards Board said it appears ” Climate change and the occurrence of extreme weather [was] a major root cause. ”

Newer projects are designed with resiliency built in. Engineers on HS2, a new high-speed rail line being built between London, Birmingham and eventually Manchester, are incorporating what is known as a sustainable drainage system using landscape engineering along the track. These are meant to ensure services can operate even during a flood that occurs once in 1,000 years.

But the age of most of the UK’s rail network makes the cost of weathering severe and means some tough decisions will be required, according to George Davies, RSSB’s sustainability director. Ultimately, the safest option is to cancel service in cases of extreme weather, he added.

“I don’t believe it is possible and almost certainly not affordable to design our rail line to be 100 per cent climate resilient, so there will be a change,” said Davies. necessary trade-offs. “I’m not sure the industry has a particularly good idea of ​​what’s acceptable.”

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