The first section of track of the new 30-mile Borders Railway has been laid in Bowshank tunnel.
Although the Borders line is a single track railway, the 200-metre tunnel has double track which is part of a 6.4-kilometre dynamic passing loop. In the tunnel clearances are tight due to the requirement for passive provision for electrification. Hence the tunnel has slab track.
On a visit to the tunnel on August 5, Global Rail News was advised that it had taken the contractor, BAM Nuttall, two weeks to install the slab track on the down loop and saw that work had just started on the up loop.
On August 9, the project’s first switch and crossing is to be installed at Tynehead, 2.5-kilometre north of the line’s summit at Falahill.
Track laying will commence in October at the northern end of the line and is planned for completion by the end of the year.
BAM Nuttall will call on BAM Rail from Holland to lay track using the technique employed on the HSL-Zuid, the Dutch high-speed line which is expected to lay track at the rate of one kilometre per day.
Good to see, I hope Beeching is spinning in his grave
Beeching didn’t close any railways, the government did
Great progress. Delighted to see it. (Beeching may not have closed the railways but he was in cahoots with Marples, the transport minister. Even then the majority were closed under the next Government – Labour – as Barbara Castle said she didn’t have the powers to stop it!) No party is without sin in my view.