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Down here in the South East and on the Hastings Line in particular, the approach seems to be buying and running more 'leaf busting' units is the answer, rather then removed the vegetation. Has network rail done a cost benefit analysis on this? As previous posters have said the vegetation is holding the banks together and removing them on the steep embankments, at places like Wadhurst for example, could have negative impacts, never mind the time and cost to doing it. The answer in the future might lie in spraying a non chemical growth restrictor than does not impact wildlife to the banks. Synthetic biology is heading in that direction. And no it is not DDT or similar.
If the aim of vegetation control is firstly, to prevent trees falling onto the track, and secondly, to stop leaf fall affecting adhesion, an awful lot of trees outside the railway boundary, as well as those within it, will have to be removed; Which is unachievable. There has to be a degree of vegetation control, certainly, trains should not be getting scraped and scratched by foliage; But there are limits to what can be done.
Please keep in mind that vegetation control is not just for mitigating braking problems and wheel slide.
A contaminated rail head also may cause:
Train detection problems for some types of train on some types of track circuits,
Problems with acceleration (wheel slip) which in turn may damage the rail head
Vegetation can damage trains and not just the paint work. If it gets under the train it can damage braking pipes and electrical systems (including aerials/sensors).
Vegetation if left unchecked will obscure signals and signs.
It seriously hinders a driver's view so that is is more difficult to see other trains or staff and for the staff to see approaching trains.
Railway staff have no safe walking route if the lineside cess is covered in vegetation. And if they need to walk in an area of vegetation, there is an increased risk of tripping over.
Vegetation will destroy stone and brick structures and may even damage concrete structures.
Vegetation may cause embankments or the banks of cuttings to become unstable or damage the vertical rock/stone/brick sides (risk of loose material falling on the line).
Vegetation may cause points failures (I know because I've had to remove leaves, twigs, bits of dead branch and weeds from inbetween the switch and stock rail / on the slide chairs or from the point mechanisms).
Vegetation may also completely surround or completely cover other signalling equipment meaning that that the signalling technicians spend time having to cut their way through to carry out fault investigation of routine maintenance (and these staff are on good money).
As with many problems, the "fix" is not just one thing that needs to be done. But a combination of things that need to be done. And better vegetation control is one thing that is needed.
However, it is unrealistic to expect the lineside to be completely returned to the 1950s state.
This work (or at least previous studies by RSSB) suggests that fitting all new train fleets with track brakes would cost only ~£10.8m per year on an ongoing basis.
I can't see you getting much vegetation clearance for anything like that.
Considering the bulk of the diesel fleet is approaching obsolesence, I think this is likely the most economic solution to this problem.
I agree that better braking systems are the way forward. However, that doesn't address the damage done by Buddleia roots, or the potential of a train colliding with a fallen tree.
I agree that better braking systems are the way forward. However, that doesn't address the damage done by Buddleia roots, or the potential of a train colliding with a fallen tree.
Well better braking systems do somewhat mitigate the potential for collisions with fallen trees.
Track brakes will allow trains to reach ~25%g braking effort and thus stop much faster.
As for buddleia, I am skeptical that any practical devegetation programme will defeat that menace!
Pre covid when I was a regular rail commuter the vegetation around my local station was all cleared to leave a strip of about 5m between rail and the rest of the vegetation.
5 years later the self seeded birch and sycamores are back and are now 5-6m tall. Any evidence of a 5m strip has gone. There is no way you can clear all the lineside vegeation on a 5 year cutting cycle.
There should be a serious discussion on the nature of single track lines and the "rationalisation" that took place to create so many lines like this.
Ultimately if the Cambrian was a standard dual track railway this incident would've been avoided. In fact, redoubling the Cambrian to avoid as much single track as possible should be the response to this in an ideal world.
It was a lot easier to keep vegetation under control when you had large supplies of very cheap labour. That is not the world we live in any more, unfortunately.
Using untrained seasonal labour next to an active railway seems unlikely to end well.
And if they have gone through the relevant training they won't be cheap any more.
Using untrained seasonal labour next to an active railway seems unlikely to end well.
And if they have gone through the relevant training they won't be cheap any more.
Is vegetation management something that still happens on active lines anymore? I presumed since red zone was banned it's all done during blocks now, which was part of the reason it barely happens anymore.
Is vegetation management something that still happens on active lines anymore? I presumed since red zone was banned it's all done during blocks now, which was part of the reason it barely happens anymore.
As long as the work and any ‘arisings’ are well away from the active running line(s) and electriffation, yes it takes place while trains are running. There have been a coulle of incidents recently where branches haven’t behaved themselves and ended up on the line in front of trains.
But more seriously, there needs to be a concerted effort to remove the biomass from the lineside. National Highways figured this out a few years ago, where instead of leaving the cut grass behind, they remove it from the verges. This reduces the available nutrients in the soil, therefore slows regrowth, and is also a boon for wildflowers that are normally outcompeted by grasses.
Network Rail need to do similar things. I get slightly frustrated when I see lineside trees felled and logpiles created for biodiversity. This is an excellent thing to do in a woodland area, since many insect species rely on decaying wood. But we don't want the lineside to be a wooded area, and so logpiles are counter productive - they are putting the nutrients back into the lineside and encouraging future tree growth. Instead we should be removing everything we can, and ending up with grasses and wildflowers. Which would make maintenance much easier - a few operatives with robotic lawnmowers rather than complex shrub and tree work.
But more seriously, there needs to be a concerted effort to remove the biomass from the lineside. National Highways figured this out a few years ago, where instead of leaving the cut grass behind, they remove it from the verges.
In my experience, National Highways (and local highways) have really struggled this year too. On my travels around the country I have found countless examples of junction signs completely covered in vegetation, invluding on Motorways.
Yeah, this isn't something I have taken lightly. I understand the importance not just of vegetation but of animals too. My husband vetoed having a cat because of the trees us around having lots of songbirds in them, but he died of cancer five years ago leaving me with a decent legacy but lonely enough to consider an indoor pussums as a companion. (His cousin has two cats, reared from a brother-sister pair of rescue kittens to be indoor cats after her venerable old one passed away, but alas, as a would-be first time owner for whom kittens would be more of a challenge, the listings on Battersea and RSPCA all have more outdoor cats than indoor and I value our relationship enough not to do anything other than adopt. So I may have to bite the bullet and ensure that I train Pussy Cat Willow to use the already-paved back yard and a litter tray rather than prowl the vegetation. The cat flap will be going in at the back!)
Sooooo....
The work has already been contracted and is going ahead. Neighbours have already done theirs in a similar fashion and the contractors mentioned nothing about planning. I'm getting gravel rather than resin as I don't use a car and in any case I'm in an interesting residential situation where my house backs onto the paved road and the front of the houses are sited around a pedestrian area that has a lot of overgrown vegetation. Basingstoke was established as a a New Town and designed in the 50s to the 70s when, despite the brutalism in architectural terms, they were thinking more holistically about town planning than before or since. Many of the specific estates actually are planned around green spaces rather than simply fronting onto roads, and take a much more sensitive approach to the human environment as well as the natural one. I like where I live and I liked my garden but I might eventually be up to caring for raised beds or doing conservation work elsewhere. But day in, day out...I'm sorry, but my garden needs to be in a state that I can maintain it myself.
I've had problems from the same trees that house the bird population -- the seeds float down onto my paths, the birds aren't potty trained, and the warm, wet weather has meant a previous contractor I got to cut everything back to bare earth in June found an ash tree literally growing out of one wall. Meanwhile uncleared leaf mulch from the trees on other side I'm not 'destroying' grew to the point where it generated its own soil ecosystem, worms and all. My mother was glad of the compost and the worms when we cleared it, so that biodiversity has been preserved, but what was a benign wilderness garden in sunnier, warmer and drier times (even back in 2018 we had a whole month without a single drop of rain, which is difficult to fathom now) when we bought the house ten years ago, had become a jungle that threatened to engulf the house.
I resisted it for a while for the biodiversity reasons (and because coming home in the summer to bees and butterflies was nice), but I'm lame (literally) and can't prune it back enough to keep it safe. The weeds in the garden mean lawnmowers can't simply keep the grass short, and strimmers require a lot of maintenance. Drainage is handled by the path sloping down into an underpass with pumping equipment to suck it up, and when it rains hard there's a small creek generated on a pathway downhill. Greenery requires cultivation and care -- they even think the Amazon rainforest itself was manmade or the byproduct of ancient peoples managing the land -- but for this individual person the small 43m2 patch isn't going to matter in the grand scheme of things if I can, say, keep up a regular donation to the Woodland Trust so that more able-bodied people can preserve important and useful green spaces.
Getting back to the question addressed by this thread, climate change is inflicting the same issues on the railway as it is on my garden. I suspect the answer is to go net-vegetation neutral -- while keeping the place manageable for myself as I grow older (and my parents are likewise also approaching proper old age) is important, I'd agree that off-setting the destruction of a small wilderness garden is the key point here.
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Well better braking systems do somewhat mitigate the potential for collisions with fallen trees.
Track brakes will allow trains to reach ~25%g braking effort and thus stop much faster.
As for buddleia, I am skeptical that any practical devegetation programme will defeat that menace!
Yeah, the annual savage, vengeful hacking at pruning of the buddleia in the front garden at my husband's old property was a thing for us. It did mean that we used butterflies as a motif at our wedding and since his tragic death at only 44, I see them as a memento and reminder of him; not long after the funeral a red admiral got in at the window and hung on the net curtains and that was just another reminder about how precious and fragile life really is. I hope the new owner of the house hasn't let it go unchecked though or it will have swallowed a whole estate worth of bungalows and generated a whole new lepidoptera naval academy.
But boy did that plant require constant maintenance. The butterfly habitat was worth it but we struggled to contain it properly. However, the railway has other needs around it and we can plant other buddleias where they might be better suiting.
There’s areas of the network with a lot of Japanese Knotweed which can’t just be hacked back, it has to be fully eliminated and disposed of as controlled waste. This is a very expensive process, in some cases cheaper to dig out the soil to quite a depth and remove, but obviously that’s not very practical on cuttings/embankments!
I recall there being quite a lot on the Manchester side of the transpennine route (noticeably more verdant on the ‘soggy’ side as soon as you burst out of the tunnel!). A huge liability for Network Rail.
It seems yesterdays snow, has completely shut lines from Exeter to Barnstaple and Oakhampton. And no road alternative road transport to Oakhampton due to poor road conditions.
Seems trees had been allowed to get to point where first snow of the winter would bring down branches onto the line. So really need to factor this in, especially as line is close to higher elevation ground (Dartmoor)
Heavy snow fall in the area between Crediton and Okehampton yesterday caused a number of trees to fall on to the railway. Network Rail are working to clear these trees and inspect the line for any damage. We do not have an estimate for when this will be completed, but until then we are unable to run trains.
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You are advised not to attempt to travel along this route at this time as we are currently unable to source any replacement road transport. We will continue to work with our suppliers and if this changes and update will be provided here.
How long before there is a serious accident and lives are lost because of the lineside vegetation/ Trees being allowed to grow so close to the railway. It is only a matter of time..warning signs and minor incidents regularly. There is going to be a big accident soon.
Uh, someone literally died due to leaf fall (and probably blocked sanders) back in October. That counts as serious in my book. It's not as dramatic or as disastrous as something like Stonehaven but it's still serious.
Is this something NR should launch an innovation competition on?
We are starting to see some very interesting innovation from agri-chemical companies starting to move towards biological rather than chemical solutions. We are also seeing some very interesting use of specially developed fungal protects to do things like eat plastic.
Perhaps a well aimed competition might get some solid minds thinking about a more sustainable (as in viable) long term solution.
The landowners next to the railway may be a problem. However, many do agree for the work to be done if the railway pays for the work. The biggest issue is finding out who the land owner is and finding the person who can give permission. Keep in mind that often vehicle access is only
