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Living in Plymouth, I take a keen interest in local rail issues - most notably Dawlish, which has a knock-on effect to the Plymouth and Cornwall economy.
I cannot believe that consideration was given to the possibility of not running Class 802 trains in stormy weather, due to the recent failures.
That would leave a quarter of a million people without a reliable train service because of a situation that hasn’t been resolved since 2014, and which is beset with delays and criticism from the locals in Dawlish about the loss of sea views.
High tides and storms are constantly causing delays and cancellations of CrossCountry trains, with passengers forced to change onto a Great Western Railway service from Exeter past Dawlish. Now imagine the despair from passengers if Class 802s can’t travel west of Exeter for the same reason.
It really isn’t on. People in the West Country shouldn’t have to put up with such inconvenience and lost productivity.
A sensible solution would be to reopen the Okehampton to Bere Alston section of the North Dartmoor route (L&SW), providing an alternative route to Dawlish in the name of resilience and opening rail travel to thousands of homes in Mid- and West Devon as well as North and East Cornwall. It would have a positive economic and environmental impact.
As for new rolling stock, here in the far South West we have not had new diesel multiple units since the early 1980s, with Class 150s and ‘153s’. We still have to put up with Class 143s due to delayed fleet cascades, and even then the trains aren’t much newer.
We would love to have some Class 195s, but I’d rather have the Okehampton route open and travel on a ‘Nodding Donkey’ if need be, rather than no alternative Dawlish route at all.
Come on Boris… show us that you are true to your words and invest in all areas that have been forgotten.
Nick Furze, Plymouth
I can’t help wondering how long the multimillion-pound strengthening work on the railway at Dawlish is going to last, given the projection of ever more violent storms and rise in sea level in the coming years being brought about by global warming.
It could well be that in 20 years’ time the whole thing will need to be done again, or even that the route will become unusable. An alternative is revisiting the GWR proposal in the 1930s to divert the line through a tunnel.
The current rate of tunnelling, as estimated by HS2 Ltd, seems to work out at between £20 million and £40m per kilometre. A 7km tunnel could cost (say) £200m-£300m, comparable to the cost of the proposed work with the added advantage that the line would be immune from further damage by the sea.
It would also lift the constant fear that people in south Devon and Cornwall have of having their sole rail link disrupted. An underground station at Dawlish would be a bonus.
Chris Barker, Hornsey