{"id":20782,"date":"2016-12-21T10:43:50","date_gmt":"2016-12-21T10:43:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=20782"},"modified":"2020-08-27T13:37:38","modified_gmt":"2020-08-27T13:37:38","slug":"folkestone-warren","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2016\/12\/21\/folkestone-warren\/","title":{"rendered":"The Folkestone Warren landslide toe weight structure"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Folkestone Warren landslide toe weight structure<\/h5>\n

On the South Coast of England the railway line between Dover (the main ferry port for travel to Europe) and London crosses a very large landslide at Folkestone Warren in Kent.\u00a0 This is a large (3 km wide), deep-seated (the shear surface extends about 40 m below sea level) rotational landslide.\u00a0 The track crosses the entire width of the landslide, located on displaced blocks, as this BGS image<\/a> shows:<\/p>\n

\"Folkestone

The Folkestone Warren landslide, image from the BGS<\/a> taken in 2002<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly this railway line has a very long history of being disrupted by the landslide.\u00a0 The most famous incident occurred on 19 December 1915, when 1.5 million cubic metres of chalk slipped, causing enormous damage to the line.\u00a0 A train was caught in the landslide, but fortunately without any loss of life:<\/p>\n

\"Folkestone

The 1915 landslide on Folkestone Warren, from British Railways, Southern Division via the BGS<\/a>)<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

The line was closed until 1919. The slope remained active thereafter – this Google Earth image from 1940 gives a good impression of the magnitude of the problems that British Railways faced at that time:-<\/p>\n

\"Folkestone

Google Earth image of the Folkestone Warren landslide from 1940<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

In 1948 an enormous toe weight structure, designed to add mass to the toe of the landslide to prevent further rotational failures, was constructed.\u00a0 This was extended between 1951 and 1952.\u00a0 There is a very nice article<\/a> (N.B. this is a PDF), published in the Railway Magazine, on the Southern Railway E-mail Group (SREmG)<\/a> site describing these works, and the associated drainage tunnels.\u00a0 This vast, and effective, toe weight can be seen in the modern Google Earth images as a platform built at the toe of the landslide:-<\/p>\n

\"Folkestone

Google Earth image of the Folketsone Warren toe weight structure<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

The effectiveness of these and the associated landslide management measures is clear from the above image – the slide is much less active now than it has been in the past.\u00a0 But nonetheless this remains a deeply challenging section of railway line for Network Rail to maintain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The massive toe weight structure protecting the railway line on the Folkestone Warren rotational landslide in Kent in southern England<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":20787,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[279],"tags":[182,469,1223,80,133],"class_list":["post-20782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mitigation","tag-england","tag-featured","tag-landslide-mitigation","tag-railway","tag-uk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20782","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=20782"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20782\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}