Rail boss 'confident' in winter weather safeguards

A Network Rail boss has said he is "really confident" safeguards will protect key rail routes in winter after millions of pounds of investment.

Key rail routes in the North West have been upgraded ahead of stormy weather patterns caused by the climate phenomenon El Niño.

North West Network Rail has invested £41m in schemes across the region, including improvements to the routes between Settle and Carlisle, between Sheffield and Manchester, and at Shap on Cumbria's West Coast Main Line.

Area director for Lancashire and Cumbria, Darren Miller, said: "It's really dificult to second-guess the weather and we're no stranger to storms in Cumbria, but we are always thinking three months ahead."

El Niño is a naturally-occurring pattern, which happens about every two to seven years and tends to last for around a year.

It brings the increased chance of wet and stormy conditions across north-west Europe during the late autumn and early winter.

A forecast released by the Met Office this autumn stated that there were already "signals for increased rainfall and storminess in autumn here in the UK", especially into November and December.

The winter of 2015 and 2016, which coincided with a very strong El Niño, brought a succession of major storms delivering, what experts at the time described, as the most extreme flooding on record.

Miller said some parts of the rail network were built during the Victorian era, so were being updated to modern standards to become "as strong as they need to be".

At Shale Cutting, new drainage and ground stablisation was installed to prevent landslips.

On the Manchester-Sheffield line, between New Mills and Hague Bar, work was accelerated to stabilise a "high risk" section of embankment.

At Shap, similar earthworks were completed alongside the installation of defences against loose rock and slope material reaching the tracks.

Miller said the work at Shap was not in response to a train which derailed on the line after hitting a landslip, but part of wider improvements across the network.

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