Revealed: Most canceled train services in Britain due to flooding | Climate News

On average, 4,500 trains a year have been canceled over the past decade, disrupting thousands of passengers and businesses, according to new data, which also reveals which stations and networks are most affected.

New data has revealed the stations and train operators worst hit by flooding in recent years, causing chaos to the journeys of thousands of passengers and demonstrating the “disruptive impact” of climate change.

Analysis of the huge amount of data shared exclusively with Sky News shows that over the past ten years:

• Most canceled route: Travelers to Edinburgh have had their trains canceled more than anyone else – with 1,805 cancellations due to flooding
•​​​​​​​ The most canceled network:Scotrail canceled the largest number of trains, 8,371
• Nearly 45,000 trains were canceled due to flooding caused by heavy rains, an average of 4,500 per year
•​​​​​​​ The worst years: 2023 will be the second worst year in the last decade for train cancellations, partly due to Storm Babet, after 2020, when Storm Dennis hit

The Network Rail data was released under Freedom of Information (FOI) laws to the non-profit Round Our Way, which advocates for people affected by climate change.

Janet Mumcu lives near Hungerford in Berkshire and takes the train to work in a care home in Newbury.

Twice this year, trains have been cancelled due to flooding on the railway line.

“I’m very frustrated with the trains,” she said.

“Because of my job, being late for work or not showing up has a huge impact on a lot of people.”

In January she was forced to cancel a service at the care home, and at Easter she again paid for a hotel near her work in case she couldn’t make it the next day.

“It’s really difficult. It’s quite stressful…and it’s also costing me money,” she said.

Roger Harding, director of Round Our Way, said that “across Britain” train travel had been “disrupted by flooding caused by severe weather linked to climate change”.

“This has many impacts on people’s lives: from missing work or hospital appointments to not being able to see our loved ones. »

He said it was “vital” for politicians to take the consequences of climate change more seriously and prevent them from becoming “more frequent and more damaging”.

How floods disrupt the railway

The rain doesn’t just flood the tracks, forcing trains to run slowly or even stop completely.

It can also cause landslides, subsidence or power outages.

Urban developments can make flooding worse because rain that might have seeped into the land now has nowhere to go.

Warmer temperatures also cause sea levels to rise, which eats away at coastal rail lines.

The Dawlish track in south Devon was destroyed by storms in 2014, requiring an £80m new sea wall and costing businesses by cutting off customers.

The ‘difficult’ struggle to keep the trains running

But climate change is making it harder to keep Britain’s rail network on track.

A Network Rail spokesperson told Sky News that climate change is “without doubt the biggest challenge facing the railway”.

A recent study revealed Higher temperatures have worsened the UK’s recent wet wintermaking total precipitation 10 times more likely and 20% wetter.

And the many people waiting on Scotland’s soggy docks will not be surprised to learn that it is in Scotland that rainfall has increased the most, according to Met Office results.

Jim Hall is a Commissioner on the Government’s National Infrastructure Commission and Professor of Climate and Environmental Risk at the University of Oxford.

Speaking before the general election was announced, he said Network Rail and train companies “generally do their best” to keep trains running, but it is an “uphill struggle”.

Much of the infrastructure, from bridges to dikes, was designed and built 150 years ago.

It simply wasn’t designed to cope with the “aggressive weather conditions we are currently experiencing”, as Network Rail puts it.

Victor Thevenet, of the Transport and Environment lobby group, warned that further delays or cancellations would “inevitably affect the attractiveness of the train”, forcing people to turn to “more polluting” cars.

What are the solutions ?

A Network Rail spokesperson said it would “never be able to make the railway completely weather-proof” but was making “huge strides to mitigate the worst that Mother Nature throws at us to keep passengers and services safe and mobile”.

The country recently doubled its spending on climate resilience to £2.8 billion over the next five years.

This money will be used to fund things like new CCTV cameras in flood hotspots and smart sensors that predict landslides – as well as problems caused by heat, such as distorted railways, as seen in the summer of 2022.

But funding “will probably have to increase further in the future”, warns Professor Hall.

The decision about who will bear the cost is up to the future government, which dictates how much rail companies can raise ticket prices and how much tax subsidies they receive.

And not all services can be saved, Network Rail warns, with towns including Penzance and Folkestone at risk of rising sea levels and storm flooding.

Philip Harrison, rail director at engineering firm Arup, which advises Network Rail, says parts of the track are stuck in a costly “cycle of damage and repair”.

The industry has been “quite responsive” but now needs to think “more strategically” about how to future-proof infrastructure to avoid huge upfront repair costs – such as the hefty clean-up bill in Dawlish, he said.

Professor Hall said a decision had to be made on “how reliable we want the railways to be” and “how much we are prepared to pay”.

Going forward, the government will need to “look much more carefully at the impact that these increasing risks from weather-related disruptions are going to have on people… (and) on the economy.”