The Hook Landslip
This page on the South Western Railway web site is called Landslip Near Hook.
This is the operator’s explanation about what happened and their solution.
Over the weekend of Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 January, heavy rain caused part of a railway embankment to collapse between Hook and Winchfield stations on the South West Main Line, which connects London Waterloo with Basingstoke.
The landslip took place on a very busy part of our route. On a normal weekday morning, around 13 trains per hour run through this section, with services between London Waterloo and Basingstoke, Exeter St Davids, Portsmouth Harbour (via Eastleigh), Salisbury, Southampton Central, Winchester and Weymouth.
The landslip left a 44-metre stretch of track suspended in mid-air and only one of the four tracks available for trains to run on. This severely restricted the number of services we could run between Basingstoke and Woking.
Initial repairs by Network Rail on Saturday 21 and Sunday 22 increased the number of trains that we could run to six per hour, however they were still unable to call at Hook from the direction of London.
Network Rail intend to fully complete their repairs by Friday 24 February, and restore services to Hook in the direction of Basingstoke from Monday 13 February.
To do this, engineers will require more access to the railway between Farnborough and Basingstoke overnight. Normally the last service to run between these stations is at around 0100, but to give engineers the time they need, services will now have to end by 2220.
I passes the site today and took these pictures.
Note.
- Network Rail had to build quite a long roadway to access the site.
- Judging by the site full of portacabins, there were a lot of people working on the site.
- There was even someone working on a Sunday.
- The information board was in the subway at Basingstoke station.
- The pictures would have better, if the sun had been in a different direction.
Network Rail have to manage a lot of embankments like this.
The Anonymous Widower 
I think that NR has been on site 24×7 since the landslip. Fortunately there was a team mobilised for another project on the network which could be diverted to fix the landslip instead. Not the first time for this location, has happened three times before I think since the railway was built, so about 40+ years apart between incidents, all in all very lucky not to lose a busy 10-12 coach train train travelling at speed over the embankment.
SWR have been very haphazard with alternative travel options for people needing to use Hook, Winchfield and to a lesser extent Fleet stations. An ever changing set of shuttle services, no regular replacement bus (SWR could have paid Stagecoach to increase the frequency and service hours of Route 13 to Basingstoke (with some buses going to Winchfield instead of Alton) with ticket acceptance, and reduced price of Basingstoke ticket to batch Hook/Winchfield price. A partially normalised service for Hook has been running for a couple of weeks now (1tph southbound, replacement bus and near regular pattern Northbound.)
Comment by MilesT | February 20, 2023 |