The rail infrastructure owner is planning to publish a sustainability strategy this summer that will focus on decarbonisation as well as network resilience. This comes after a spate of landslips and weather related emergencies have affected passenger services in recent years, including a landslip at Edenbridge in Kent at the end of 2019.

“Forty thousand tonnes of material needs to be brought there to restore a relatively small piece of embankment,” Network Rail chief executive Andrew Haines told a media briefing on Friday.

“We absolutely recognise that we have got to do more in terms of climate change adaption, and some of our assets like earthworks are very unpredictable.” The incident at Edenbridge, he said, had not been predicted by Network Rail engineers. The route could reopen in March.

“The breadth of climate change consequences are now with us almost every month of the year,” he added.

Regional managing director for North West & Central Tim Shoveller said that, in addition to problems affecting earthworks and drainage due to heavy rainfall, climate change also brings problems relating to stronger winds and hotter summers.

“We suffered enormously at Euston during the summer,” he said. New overhead lines installed at the station in 1999 were not ‘auto tensioned’, meaning they started to sag under the high temperatures. “That illustrates that even things we have done relatively recently are going to require investment and change.”

Network Rail has a £2.2Bn risk fund of unallocated money for its current Control Period 6 spending period, a “large chunk” of which will go towards resilience, said Andrew Haines.

Moving forward, he said: “We are going to have to look more at system risk, and look whether in future if there are financial constraints we need to be diverting money from other things.

“That might be tough but as the asset owner we may need to decide if we should be putting less money into track and more into earthworks and structures.”

Also this week, Network Rail has launched a consultation on updated proposals to protect the railway between Parsons Tunnel and Teignmouth in South Devon from cliff falls and landslips.

The line was badly affected by extreme weather in 2014 shortly after the sea wall breach at Dawlish further along the coast.

The proposals involve realigning the railway out towards the sea in order to make room for cliff stabilisation works. Public views are sought on the latest designs which claim to retain most of the beach – an important issue for local people – and feature improved leisure access.

(Photograph: Network Rail)