Qualla: South Devon Railway sea wall

South Devon Railway sea wall: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Edmund Evans, Public domain. Five months after Isambard Kingdom Brunel's railway from Exeter to Teignmouth opened to traffic in May 1846, the storms of October broke through the new sea wall in several places and washed out the line. Repairs took fifty hours. The trains then ran again, alongside the open Channel, on a four-mile section of track that has been at war with weather and water ever since. The South Devon Railway sea wall is one of the most photographed pieces of railway infrastructure in Britain, partly because the engineering is dramatic, and partly because the dramatic part keeps repeating itself. A train comes around the cliffs at Dawlish in a winter storm. Waves break clean over the locomotive. Sometimes the wall holds. Sometimes a piece of it falls into the sea, taking the track with it, and the country south of Exeter is cut off from the rest of the rail network until Network Rail can put the line back together. The line has always done this. The line has never stopped running.

Image: Edmund Evans | Public domain

South Devon Railway sea wall: Brunel's Choice

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit en:User:Lew747, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Exeter to Newton Abbot line was the southern half of Brunel's broad-gauge railway from London to Penzance. From Exeter it follows the River Exe estuary south to Dawlish Warren. Then, for four miles, it runs along the open coast at the foot of red sandstone cliffs, ducking thr...

Image: en:User:Lew747 | CC BY-SA 3.0

South Devon Railway sea wall: A Hundred Years of Breaches

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geof Sheppard, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 24 December 1852 a rockfall at Breeches Rock blocked the line. Passengers walked past the rubble to join trains on the other side. In February 1855 large portions of the wall washed away and the resident engineer built a temporary viaduct within two weeks so coaches could be p...

Image: Geof Sheppard | CC BY-SA 3.0

South Devon Railway sea wall: February 2014

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geof Sheppard, CC BY-SA 3.0. On the night of 4 February 2014, during the worst storms to hit the south coast in decades, the sea wall at Dawlish was breached. Around 40 metres of the wall, and the ballast under the railway immediately behind it, were torn out. The line dangled in the air, the rails suspended...

Image: Geof Sheppard | CC BY-SA 3.0

South Devon Railway sea wall: What Comes Next

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geof Sheppard, CC BY-SA 3.0. Network Rail set up the South West Rail Resilience Programme after the 2014 storm. Government funding of 80 million pounds was approved in February 2019 to raise the sea wall south of Dawlish station by 2.5 metres. A 109-metre rockfall shelter at the northern end of Parsons Tunne...

Image: Geof Sheppard | CC BY-SA 3.0