Barnstaple station wins gold again - but Tim Steer says weather resilience funding is the real fight ahead

What a great achievement it is for the Friends of Barnstaple Railway Station (that I also chair) to win these awards year on year.

There has been lots to celebrate with the work that you have seen at Barnstaple station, including the successful bid to GWR's Customer and Community Improvement Fund that saw a new bug house signal box and new wagon-style station planters. In the car park, we now have two new station and line history boards that were designed by the Barnstaple Town Council heritage team. We must thank GWR and Network Rail for giving us the permissions and funds to achieve this work.

Stations in Bloom looks at community-led station work around the whole of the South West, and they are based along the Blackmore Vale line. When the Stations in Bloom judge Derek Beer came down to see the station, we joked about how many attempts we had at meeting up. It was either the North Devon line services were cancelled until further notice due to storms, flooding, bridge diving inspections and a line blockade, or the Blackmore Vale line had soil moisture deficit.

Soil Moisture Deficit is a term to describe how the earth behaves once it is heated up in the summer, dries out and starts to crack open – this can cause the railway sleepers and other infrastructure to lose their structural integrity, and there have been reports up-country of this having devastating consequences.

It became apparent that while the North Devon line had its share of weather-related issues mainly in the winter periods, other lines are experiencing heat-related challenges in the summer – one size does not fit all!

Anyone who reads this paper will know that the Northern Devon Railway Development Alliance is working on a plan to modernise the existing line for a much more weather-resilient and dependable journey, and that the local MP Ian Roome is doing all he can in Parliament to address the fact that the line needs improvements.

Weather-related rail resilience isn't just a challenge for Northern Devon. For South Devon, their main line that links Exeter to Plymouth and the whole of Cornwall was hit by heavy storms in 2014, and many of us saw the pictures of a rail line suspended in mid-air along the Dawlish coast.

Thankfully, Network Rail managed to work on a funding package to make the Dawlish sea wall much more robust against storms, and their team have managed to complete phases 1-4 out of 5 to deliver the South West Rail Resilience Programme.

Some may debate that a new inland route through Heathfield or across Okehampton to Tavistock could be a secondary route; however, Network Rail are insistent that their work along the South Devon Main Line has proved to be weather-resilient. They now require central government to supply the funds to complete phase 5.

Down in Looe, Cornwall, their line was ironically a canal over a century ago, and after the December storms, that line was underwater for months.

What this is telling us is that the whole of Devon and Cornwall's rail network’s weather resilience needs to have a central government funding package to future-proof our vital rail services—this includes having trains that can handle the extreme heat.

Extreme weather is not going away, and it is causing a variety of challenges to Network Rail and the operators. Will the railways of the South West one day get the same investment that we are now seeing going to the North?