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Thursday 13 Jun 2013

Rail repair at Hatfield & Stainforth

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Network Rail has revealed details of the scale of the technical work being undertaken to repair the railway close to Hatfield Colliery. The line was severely damaged when a spoil heap became destabilised in February.

The spoil heap adjacent to the Doncaster to Wrawby rail line failed early in February resulting in a slip of 1.4m tonnes of spoil material. The landslip moved all four tracks vertically by five metres and laterally by 15 metres. The slip mainly contained mudstones, in both granular form and a fine slurry-like material which is formed during the washing and coal fines reclamation, known as MRF. The material which blocked the railway was supporting a 200,000m³ cell of MRF. This cell was around 20m deep and, due to the landslip, was falling in the direction of the railway lines which made the removal much more complex and prolonged.

Phil Verster, Route Managing Director for Network Rail, said: “This has been one of the most complex recovery operations in recent years. In all, around one million cubic metres of material needs to be moved – that includes the slipped material itself and also enabling movements to create storage such as bunds and dams.

“We have made excellent progress moving the material and also moved the water main in order to create a space to which the MRF is being moved. We have bought new land at Ashfields to create new tipping sites. That land has been stripped of topsoil which will be used for landscaping once the tip is complete.

“We have to move approximately sixty thousand cubic metres more spoil before the work to reinstate the track can begin in the coming weeks. A section of around five hundred metres of all four lines will be replaced, including switches and crossings and the associated signalling and power supplies. Even then there will be more work to complete while trains run past the site.”