I give you the Dawlish Dipper !   


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I've seen this for real several times today, as the coach company I drive for are covering the rail journeys from Exeter to Plymouth, and people are so ungrateful, whinging and whining that it takes 2 1/2 hours to Plymouth by coach as opposed to less than an hour by rail, the roads are bad enough down here with floods, trees down and long diversions in some cases. A truly sad sight though, question is, if Brunel's men could make it last 150+ years, why can't railtrack sort it properly?

Because it was built pre global warming. Even its builders had a lot of trouble with the Dawlish stretch.

The GWR planned to bypass it in the 1930s going I believe via the Teign Valley/Heathfield/Mortonhampstead route - with major improvements of the route. Some bloke with a little mustache started a war, then we had post war recovery and then Beeching appeared so it never got built.

Putting the Oakmapton-Tavistock bit of the LSWR route back would itself not be horrendously hard (bit over 20 miles), although you'd still have to fix Exeter to avoid the flooding there. The LSWR route was however itself historically badly affected by snow so had its own set of problems.

The Dawlish collapse has now eaten under the houses on the far side of the road, and can't be fixed until the weather lifts (days ?) so will presumably do far more damage before it can be fixed. They've evacuated a load of people.

My own view is that it would be far to dangerous to attempt any repairs until this bout of foul weather passes even if it means the line etc being out of order for another few weeks. The repairs can wait till risk of life is nearly as low as it can be.