Major engineering work across the south coast to impact services in Southampton, Portsmouth and Bournemouth during the Easter holidays

Transcript

00:00So I'm Geoff Rose I'm a program manager for Network Rail and term the blockade

00:05director so I have the overarching control of the blockade that is running

00:10from Fairham all the way down to St Denis. There's a 14 mile blockade we stop

00:16the trains over that distance because we can turn trains at Fairham or we can

00:21turn trains at St Denis and the reason why we need to take possession of the

00:25railway for the nine days is to carry out this work here which is what we call

00:31Abbey Road or Oak Road where we have an embankment or cutting that has been on

00:36the move and has been slipping over a number of years we've done some work

00:39here before in fact we've been here twice before where we've repaired slippages and

00:45we've come back again because there's been more slipages we've done three more

00:49areas of sheet piling into the ground putting the sheet pile sort of eight

00:55meters down into the ground so that we can retain the area that's been slipping

01:00we'll take some of the top soil off of that bench it and then put more granular

01:08soil back on behind it to contain the embank the cutting sides the other thing

01:15we're doing here in between where we've done the piling is we're putting in

01:19what's called rock ribs where we cut basically a slot a trench in the ground

01:24going up the cutting and then we fill that with loose stone so rocks it's

01:31actually recycled ballast where we've taken the old ballast out of the tracks

01:35because it's lost its angular angular angularity and we're reusing that in

01:41in the in the rock ribs that gives two things one it stops the whole area becoming very

01:46sodden it allows water to come out and also strengthens the track strengthens the embankment

01:53yeah so the amount of work that needs to be done here it's it's 300 meters you know a third of

01:58a kilometer of work a lot of equipment which just happens not to be here right at the moment

02:04because it's gone back to the main site to replenish um stocks um but we've uh we've had

02:11you know four or five um pieces of on track plant hammering in and vibrating in all these piles for

02:18the first half of the nine days and then for the second half of the nine days we're doing all the

02:23digging and the filling of uh of the um the rock material um to give the better drainage now if we did

02:31that all that work over the over weekends we'd have to set everything up every weekend break it down

02:37every weekend so we'd lose quite a lot of working time particularly as we have to travel backwards

02:43and forwards from the access point which is three and a half miles away um so uh in order to minimize

02:51the amount of disruption which would otherwise be 15 to 16 weekends we've taken the nine day blockade

02:57to carry out these works all in one hip in addition that allows us to carry out other work on the rest

03:04of the 14 miles so we're also doing work to a footbridge down at hamble we've been repairing that

03:09so we've been able to get access in there and some drainage work down at hamble as well and we've done

03:14a lot of vegetation clearance um you know dead and dying trees and overhanging branches and things like

03:20that uh between uh netley and st denis as well as doing some renewal of some uh what we call wheel

03:28timbers on the bitum viaduct uh wheel timbers are the big section of timbers that hold the the rail

03:33as it crosses the the viaduct that goes over the bitum river or the itchern river in fact now we can

03:39do that at the same time as we're doing this work because it's quite a distance away from where we're

03:45working here but it does mean that we don't need other access to come in at other times to carry out the

03:49work when we do it in the nine days um consecutively yeah so we take opportunity to do more than more

03:58work than the reason that we've closed the railway in the first place