{"id":14416,"date":"2015-02-02T07:50:17","date_gmt":"2015-02-02T07:50:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=14416"},"modified":"2015-02-02T07:51:13","modified_gmt":"2015-02-02T07:51:13","slug":"the-harbury-tunnel-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2015\/02\/02\/the-harbury-tunnel-1\/","title":{"rendered":"The Harbury tunnel and cutting landslide in Central England"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Harbury cutting and tunnel landslide<\/h5>\n

An unsually large railway slope landslide occurred on Saturday afternoon at the site of the Harbury cutting and tunnel, on the train line between Leamington Spa and Banbury in Warwickshire, Central England.\u00a0 The railway line is blocked.\u00a0 The Network Rail press releas<\/a>e about the incident described it as being “extremely significant” and estimated that a volume of about 350,000 cubic metres of debris will need to be removed from the site to reopen the line.\u00a0 The images of the landslide are impressive:<\/p>\n

\"Harbury<\/a>

Network Rail image<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

\"Harbury<\/a>

Network Rail image<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

The press release also suggests that the landslide is still moving and that the tunnel itself has been affected, so this may be quite complicated to put right.<\/p>\n

In the UK there is a large community of railway enthusiasts.\u00a0 One of their websites has a discussion<\/a> from four years ago about the Harbury cutting and tunnel site, which includes this image:<\/p>\n

\"Harbury<\/a>

https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/andy_hoare\/5148073567\/<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

The tunnel is in the background.\u00a0 But perhaps most interesting is this historic image of the Harbury Tunnel and cutting being dug in April 1884<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"Harbury<\/a>

Image from Warwickshirerailways.com <\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

The caption for the above photograph reads<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“The problem of slippages in the very deep cutting of Harbury resulted in the GWR taking radical action. The dark areas adjacent to the line indicate what is left of the original cutting. As can be seen the GWR widened the cutting to create a more gentle slope adjacent to the line. The track is clearly standard gauge yet they are formed using the Broad Gauge method of construction of using longitudinal timbers under the rails with ties at six to eight feet apart.\u00a0 April 1884”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This site appears to have suffered some instability during the winter storms of February 2014, and news reports at the time<\/a> suggested that the line was closed for a while.\u00a0 The cutting itself was constructed in 1847 and was for a while the deepest man-made cutting in the world, dug of course entirely manually.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A major landslide occurred in the Harbury cutting and tunnel in Warwickshire, England on Saturday, blocking an important railway line<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":14417,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[828,469,959,80,6,133],"class_list":["post-14416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-landslide-report","tag-cutting","tag-featured","tag-landslide-report","tag-railway","tag-train","tag-uk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14416\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}