European Railroad Discussion > Dawlish: UK train and stormy seas

Take a look at Photo #9 in The Atlantic magazine's Photos of the Week: 

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/02/photos-of-the-week-12823/515628/

Amazing photo - thanks for the link.chris uk

Definitely in the right place at the right time.

If I remember correctly, this line was totally washed out by storms a couple of years ago.  The weather and ocean don't seem to have changed.

This is one of the spots that was breached almost exactly 3 years ago (4 February 2014). If you look closely you can see a difference to the retaining wall behind the stairs. The main breach was further west, but all of this was shunt for about 2 months back in 2014.

The storms that we had last Thursday/Friday were quite similar to those that we'd had then, there were quite a few of us here wondering how the wall would stand up. Fortunately the rest of the winter hasn't been as bad. During those two days CrossCountry weren't running most of their services past Exeter (the Voyagers that they use don't like getting wet!). All of the GWR services got a nice rinse though. I was on a service going through there once that got hit by a wave...not too much of a problem except some of the windows popped open and we got a bit damp!

On 3rd February (2017) 1A73 which is a Plymouth to Paddington HST service got to Somerton (between Taunton and Castle Cary) and suffered from some form of axle failure on the leading power car.   It made Castle Cary about 38 minutes late and was promptly cancelled.   It sat there for a couple of hours before they separated the affected power car (like the new Brightline trains in Florida they have one power car each end) which was at the London end of the train.   I'm not quite sure how they managed (some fairly complex shunt moves to get it from the "up" to the "down" line) it but the dead power car is still sitting in a siding at Castle Cary (6th February) and the rest of the train (with just the one power car) headed back to the depot at Laira, Plymouth.   I suspect it went that direction simply because it meant the power car was on the end pointing to Laira.   If you want to see an HST with just one power car go here Dawlish webcam and scroll down to the post dated 3rd February at 1241.