Railway back on track after ‘hardest’ fix

£23m repairs finished after major landslip closed route

Atrain line closed for over a year will reopen this week after the most challenging repair project on UK railways in at least 15 years.

The Settle-Carlisle route has been severed in Cumbria since February 2016 when half a million tonnes of earth gaveway under the tracks after weeks of heavy rain. Full services resume on Friday after engineering work costing £23million.

The route provides a lifeline to thousands of small businesses and is a magnet for rail enthusiasts.

Network Rail, which was set up in 2002 to maintain and enhance rail infrastructure, said the scale and remote location of the repair work made it the most challenging in its history.

The first Northern service will depart Carlisle at 5.50am on Friday, with Flying Scotsman visiting the city to mark the occasion. Martin Frobisher, a route managing director at Network Rail, said: “For the past 13 months our focus has been to get customers and goods moving again on this vital economic artery through Britain’s most beautiful landscape.”

The reopening of the whole line – which is normally used by more than a million passengers each year – will be a welcome boost to the region’s tourism industry.

The 72-mile route takes passengers through the ruggedly beautiful countryside of the Yorkshire Dales andtheEdenValley, andincludes the Ribblehead Viaduct, which is 104ft high and has 24 arches. A section was shut on February 9 last year at Eden Brows, near Armathwaite village south of Carlisle, after aerial surveillance and track monitoring teams detected the ground slipping beneath the line towards the River Eden 70 metres below.

Over the following weeks the track subsided a metre and a half. The repair involved hundreds of steel tubes filled with concrete being set into the hillside to form a corridor on which a 100-metre long concrete slab was placed, giving the railway a solid base.

Built in 1876 as one of the last Victorian infrastructure projects, traffic on the line has been light for most of its existence. British Rail proposed its closure in 1983, but the Tory governmentannounceda reprieve in 1989 following a public outcry.

“Our focus has been to get customers and goods moving on this vital artery”

SOLID FOUNDATION: A train goes over the section of line which now rests on a concrete shelf which was built over steel tubes, left, to prevent further landslips