Heavy rain led to over 1000t of stone and mud being deposited on a section of track on Scotland’s West Highland line between Fort William and Mallaig last Sunday night.

 

The landslip from the mountainside above damaged the railway and caused the derailment of a train, prompting a repair operation that saw the line reopened on Monday.

 

Elsewhere the main line between Glasgow and Edinburgh reopened on Friday following a landslip at Winchburgh in West Lothian, while over in Wales 150t of debris had to be removed from the a section of line between Porth and Treherbert.

 

Network Rail and other transport infrastructure operators are now urged to work with landowners to consider tree planting as a way of managing uplands beside roads and railways.

 

These areas are often grazed by sheep and offer little tree cover, allowing significant runoff when the ground becomes saturated, explained Confederation of Forest Industries technical director Andrew Heald.

 

“Landslips cost a huge amount of money in terms of both track repairs and disruption to passengers,” he said, suggesting that investment should go into ‘soft engineering’ measures to prevent these incidents from happening so frequently.

 

Lessons, he said, are there for the UK to learn from parts of Europe where forests are used to protect towns and infrastructure from landslips and avalanches.

 

“We are not simply saying ‘plant trees everywhere’,” he continued. “But putting the right trees in the right place and managing them in the right way should hold the soil together a bit better and hopefully prevent the land from slipping.”

 

As a next step, Andrew Heald urged Network Rail to re-examine some of its more ‘difficult’ sites and think differently about how trackside vegetation can be managed. “Climate change will bring more storm events to the UK and create more saturated ground; maybe it is time to do things differently,” he said.