Land Slip Delays

The landslip was reported in the late afternoon, well before 1900, by a member of the public, who subsequently contacted the police. The 10mph emergency speed restriction was implemented after 1900hrs, following attendance by a Duty Reliability Manager, and then the ERU and civil engineers.

The area affected is several metres north of the M25, for around 400m, up until signal A966. The landslip affects the embankment on the northbound road, but the 10mph has been implemented on both roads following advice from civil engineers. There are pictures show the land to have cut away as close as the cable run for the distance of about two car lengths. Because of how close it is to the railway, and the gradient of the embankment, it was not immediately obvious to drivers how bad the landslip was until a DRM was sent to site.

The situation is going to be ongoing for several weeks. Some of the plant equipment required to remedy the problem was supposed to be delivered on Wednesday. Most of the delays for the Met can be clawed back by running trains fast south of Ricky, or allowing Amersham trains to reverse off the platform instead of the sidings, but I can appreciate that Chiltern can't quite make any more time up getting caught up in the 10mph themselves.

Because the Met isn't particularly impacted timetable-wise, I'd imagine this is why there is no formal public address about the delays besides what we as drivers say, or what is said locally on stations.

"The speed restriction is adding two or three minutes to journeys north of Rickmansworth"

Not to mention extended journey times for peak SB local line traffic that gets held at North Harrow waiting for delayed fast trains to overtake and cross the junction...

In case you haven't seen what we're dealing with (as per Finn Brennan's post on the ORR notice served to London Underground on the matter):


The gravity of this situation means it is likely to take months, and these people are working more or less around the clock. Work to reinforce the embankment did not start immediately because of the wait for equipment, and having to restructure the land around the site in order to make it safe to work on as well as safe for heavy duty equipment to access the site. The piling equipment has made good some of the site, but there's still a lot to do in terms of moving earth around along the entire stretch of the site on what is already compromised. Naturally, any significant rainfall will impact the process and any progress that has already been made.

In light of the recently completed pile work, the temporary speed restrictions have been reviewed and we are now permitted to run at 15mph NB and 25mph SB respectively past the site.

Have trees been removed from that stretch of embankment, by any chance?

The photo from version3point1 shows some of the trees on the other side of the line with very few leaves on for this time of the year.

Wonder if they've had die-back to contend with on the afflicted side? Unless there's a history of branches on the line, I'd be surprised if they'd simply grubbed out what look like mature trees for essentially cosmetic reasons.

LU are dreadful about removing trees - very unsound ecology (all right, I know they don't like wheel flats). But if the stabilising effect of the trees is to undermine embankment stability, they may begin to look kindly on a few visits to the wheel lathe.....
The embankment between Woodford Jc and Woodford has been grossly denuded of trees - wonder how stable that is?

Yeh, that's what I meant-but I can't think which trees die-back disease affects most; believe it's presently ash, which is one of our biggest native species, but the particular plant pathogen affects 70 species world-wide and is a soil-borne water mould, which causes the roots to rot.

And that would indeed mean the branches die & could cascade down in heavy winds.

Gorse appears to have been planted around Chorleywood, presumably for embankment stability.

Think it was about a month ago now