PHILIP SHERRATT DESCRIBES NETWORK RAIL’S PLANS TO IMPROVE THE RESILIENCE OF THE RAILWAY BETWEEN EXETER AND NEWTON ABBOT
‘Money is no object’ was the refrain from then Prime Minister David Cameron when the sea wall at Dawlish collapsed back in February 2014. The Government pledged to do what was necessary to make the only rail link to Devon and Cornwall resilient to the kinds of events which closed the line for two months. More recently, Transport Secretary Chris Grayling has described resilience at Dawlish as a top priority.
So far, the railway between Exeter and Newton Abbot has had £15 million committed towards designing solutions to improve resilience, with £80 million awarded to implement these at Dawlish itself. But this is just the tip of the iceberg; as Network Rail’s Senior Programme Manager Dave Lovell tells Modern Railways, the programme to make the railway along the 20½-mile stretch resilient is potentially a 40-year effort spanning many Control Periods.
In the aftermath of the 2014 closure, Network Rail published a West of Exeter Route Resilience study: the broad conclusion was that the most feasible solution is to maintain the current railway and make it more resilient. In 2015, NR then c…
