Leaf on the line

Hastings is at the far southern end of a railway line that has been causing headaches ever since it was built in the 1850s.

For a start it's built through the beautiful countryside of the High Weald. Of course, 'beautiful' to a railway engineer translates as 'awkward' - it cuts through a series of sandstone ridges, waterlogged clay basins and ancient woodlands. There are eight tunnels between Tonbridge and Hastings, jerry built on the cheap by subcontractors who only lined the tunnels with one row of bricks. Several of tunnels collapsed a few years after the line opened and had to be rebuilt with extra courses of bricks added to the inside of the tunnel to make them more stable. This made the tunnels too narrow for normal trains to be able to pass one another while inside them, so the Victorians built special narrow trains specifically for the line - a tradition that continued until the mid 80s when the line was electrified and the tracks inside the narrowest tunnels were singled. The train pictured is one of the old narrow bodied diesel 'Thumpers' I used to commute to London on.

There are a lot of woodlands facing the track all the way down the line, and every autumn the leaves fall onto the track. This gets run over by the trains and turns into a slippery mulch which greatly reduces the grip between the wheels and the track. Then consider some of the gradients the trains have to haul themselves up and down. The trains can literally be brought to a standstill by a few trees and a windy day.

A few years ago South East Trains decided that the solution to their problem would be to cut down the trees. After all, if there are no trees, there are no leaves, right? So they cut down swathes of trees on the embankments and cuttings along the route. Alas, what they forgot was that by removing the trees they also disturbed the root system that helped bind the steep slopes of the clay earthworks together. And earlier this year it started raining and didn't stop for three months. A series of landslips happened along a fifteen mile stretch of track and the line was closed for three months.

However, to the best of my knowledge, no train has ever actually fallen over like the one in the strip.