Reactive

The saying ‘prevention is better than the cure’, is certainly true in the management of earthworks and drainage

However much of Britain’s railways are founded upon Victorian earthworks, which are simply not as resilient as modern engineered slopes.

Extreme weather events in the UK are on the rise putting further pressure on our rail infrastructure, and almost inevitably, a small number of the 190,000 earthworks assets will fail unexpectedly. CML’s directly employed delivery teams, spread throughout England and Wales are strategically placed to respond to infrastructure emergencies at short notice to assist our infrastructure clients, and minimise disruption to key transport networks and public services.

The combination of our site delivery teams and diverse plant fleet, supported by in-house design and engineering expertise, means we can provide a rapid response service for our infrastructure clients, not only to remediate earthworks failures, but to attend to any civil engineering emergency.

Mexborough Embankment Failure Emergency Response

CML’s engineers received a call-out to investigate track faults and back-scars observed on the embankment slope near Mexborough Junction, promptly resulting in the closure of the railway to traffic.

Design engineers identified a series of shallow failures affecting over 250 yards of the railway embankment, sat directly adjacent to the River Don Navigation. Considering site constraints and the need for a rapid solution to re-open the railway, a sheet piled solution was employed to rectify the embankment failure.

Check out the short video showing the installation of the sheet pile solution.

Dewsbury Embankment Failure

A collapsed section of a 5m high masonry retaining wall at Dewsbury resulted in the partial closure of the railway between Manchester and Leeds. To make safe and re-open the railway as soon as possible, a granular fill berm solution was selected to reinstate support to the railway. Over the course of the next 72 hours, our teams worked around the clock to install over 2500 tonnes of compacted fill, enabling the railway to reopen safely at line speed.

Check out the short video showing the completed work.

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  • Thanks for the stellar efforts of your team this week. It’s been a very impressive collective response - and rapid - to a problem that would take a far longer time to scale, plan and deliver were it setup as a conventional project.

    Your team have done a brilliant job, working round the clock like this and pulling everything together in such short timescales is a challenging ask, the way the work has been managed and completed with no safety issues and minimal social complaints from the community has been impressive, as is the seamless nature all the teams have integrated.

    Thankyou for your support.

    Jason Hamilton - Network Rail Route Programme Director

  • We will open the line at Hexham tomorrow exactly when we said we would. It has been a fantastic effort by your guys, leading from the front and working in a safe and respectful way that all contractors should aspire to.
    Please pass on my personal thanks to everyone involved, particularly those guys who battled through torrential rain, snow, ice and gales - a fantastic effort that everyone should be proud of.

    Rob McIntosh - Network Rail Eastern Region Managing Director

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