The £18 million Hinksey flood alleviation scheme is helping to protect a busy section of mainline railway between London and the Midlands from flooding, increasing the resilience of the UK’s rail network.
This section of railway at Hinksey, Oxford, UK, has an extensive history of flooding and it was identified as a top 10 priority site requiring increased resilience following damage caused by winter storms. Since 2000, it has become inundated with floodwater on average every two years, with the impacts of climate change expected to worsen this significantly. We provided multidisciplinary services to this high-profile project, taking the design from feasibility to implementation, and delivered the works during a short 16-day planned closure of the railway line in August 2016.
We undertook extensive flood modeling of the Hinksey area and proposed infrastructure improvements to minimise the rail network downtime, keeping customer disruption to a minimum. Our infrastructure improvements included increasing track bed height and installing large culverts to increase conveyance of flow in a very technically challenging region — with the aim to increase resilience as opposed to flood prevention. The scheme will help Network Rail avoid the fines associated with the inoperability of the railway, potentially leading to savings of approximately £200 million.