The Completed Phase Two Sea Wall Tour Part 1

Phase 2 of the Dawlish Sea Wall is now complete, so @BeachCamsMan and Jack Brookes from @BAMNuttallTV show us around the completed project as we look back at the construction of this vital stretch of railway line.

Part 2 will be next week or watch now for VIPs.

Stoneman Engineering Special https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsynqLjw48c&t=18s
Shay Murtagh Special https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeLmHz6AJWw&t=17s
Storm Special https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0kuNuAIhqQ

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🕘 Timestamps:
0:00 Intro and overview
1:03 Railway station bridge and platform renewals
9:39 Stilling basin area
18:36 Pre-cast facing panels
21:43 Link Bridge
24:30 Old storm footage
27:55 Outro

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#dawlish #dawlishseawall #dawlishstorms

Hello it’s Beach Cams Man and Jack from Bam and in part one of this video Jack shows us around Dawlish Railway Station and talks about the complexities of the build operations. He shows us around the completed Stilling Basin and we show you some incredible footage from the Build.

We also look at some historic videos that shows us why this section of the railway needed upgrading. But first, it’s our 10th birthday this month and to celebrate ten years of live streaming, you can get a VIP subscription at a ridiculous price on our website. Just head to coastcams.me/10 So new footbridge itself

That was installed in about ten weekends after the foundations were completed. So the footbridge itself sits on eight piles either side of the lift towers, and then you’ve got the plant rooms, which are basically the gray walls you can see on the right hand side over there underneath the stairs.

That’s what houses all the mechanical and electrical equipment, which powers the lifts and the hydraulics in the lifts on both sides. Just on the platforms while we’re on here, in total, the platform is obviously completed probably about a year and a half ago, actually coming up to two years now, isn’t it?

Yeah, we started them in the in February. Right. Is a weekend closure wasn’t it? Yeah. We had four weekend closures. So in total we’d done 500 meters of platform renewal. So that’s 300 meters on the down the down as we refer to the route,

The train lines as the up and the down depending on the direction of the traffic. So on this side we’ve got the up main on that side we’ve got the down main on the down main we’ve completed roughly about 300 meters of platform renewals.

And on the up line we’ve completed roughly about 200 meters so 500 meters In total, that 500 meters of renewals was completed in the March blockades, which we we did the kind of series over the weekend showing there how much the volume of work which we can complete in a 48 hour period.

So we were roughly doing about 125 meters a weekend. The station platforms we’ve we’ve realigned all of the Copers. So when you would, when you would come onto Dawlish platforms before you would normally hear an announcement, please mind the gap or on the step they still have it at teignmouth down the road.

Yeah that would be where you don’t get stepping distances coming onto the train. That’s compliant with that specific train. Obviously when the platforms were originally built, train models have developed over the years. Yeah. And you get different stepping heights and different stepping distances on different models of trains.

When we complete it, the platform renewals, we’ve realigned all the copers to show that they were in compliant distances with the new trains in terms of height and that stepping distance to go on to the train and the new yellow lining throughout, new mechanical electrical equipment throughout and new telecoms equipment.

So the telecoms is your CCTV and all the kind of customer information screens where you’ve got the double double sign next to an indicator up here and then you’ve got your speakers, which run throughout the platforms, we are in the process of working with Network Rail to install

It’s called a DANS system. And what that system does is it reduces the noise being announced through the speakers as trains come into the platform so lowers the noise is the speakers night and raises the noise of the speakers, it’s trains rather rather than a belt in full, belt all day long.

We’ve have had a few complaints from the local residents just because of the volume of speakers which are now in place. Right. Okay. So that’s been installed on nights this week, we are running the cabling for that at the moment and then you come up onto the footbridge itself.

Can we use a lift? We’ve not done the lifts. Yeah. The footbridge itself underneath the handrailing and on both sides is illuminated over the top of the deck itself is illuminated as well. As you come around underneath the footbridge then you have the lift towers. Yeah.

Very, very difficult thing to build these lift towers were just because of the amount of reinforcement which was in, the foundations for these and also the tie bars which connect all of the lift shaft sections together. Yeah. So there’s a 40 mm bar which is roughly about that big,

There’s 28 of them in each lift shaft tower section which go right from the bottom right to the top of the lift towers. Okay. The lift towers themselves have almost this kind of sand washed effect on them. Yeah. And that was a finish chosen by the local authority.

So we have to get the finishes agreed with the local authority before we start any of the work. Okay. That was a requirement. So we send them kind of six or seven different products which, which we think I’d like to use and they select them. As you come into the lift,

The lifts were installed by Stannah. All of the products that we use in the list are stainless steel with a marine environment, and then the lifts are connected up to a telecom system. And what that does is if anybody ever presses the emergency

Alarm button or the emergency call button on the outside, it goes back to the control group. So they arrange for the maintenance contractor to come out. So this lift itself is a 16 person lift or maximum of 12 hundred kilos. And then as you walk out, you can access over the foot bridge

Onto the opposite side. On the right hand side, then we’ve got the stainless steel parapets, really robust heavy duty system. This was installed by Stoneman Engineering We have done a video which I’m sure you’ll put in the link below. If you do want to watch the video of how we fabricated

And installed with Stoneman. There’s a lot of engineering that goes behind this. Yeah. Onto the front face of the parapet on either side we have, this is called a I think it’s garda strip and basically that’s illuminated underneath which provides the lighting for the foot bridge at night time.

Looks really smart at night. Yeah. And the reason why the footbridge doesn’t have a canopy over the top is, is purely design and planning related, really. So it all comes back from the planning officer and through design as well. If you can imagine, this has been designed to withstand storm

Loads, which is why you end up with steel. So it’s thick in this scenario and you know, you’re not designing it for the calm days, like today, you’re designing it for that one in 200 year storm event that’ll come out of nowhere and and cause damage to the south coastline. Yeah.

And we go back down then onto the down platform, Network Rail are currently looking at undertaking some work with another contractor SISK to bring some of the buildings back into use. Now that we’ve put the seawall in place and now that the promenade is backfilled

On that side and can start to look at doing a bit of refurb work to the station. So I’m not entirely sure what the full scope of the refurb packages are, because we’re not involved with that. You know, we’re more civils and bigger schemes. On the left hand side, you’ve

Got the cladding which was installed, So this type of cloudiness installed throughout Marine Parade and throughout the station building. Most Marine Parade, it’s got slightly different look and texture. Yeah, yeah. This is more natural stone here again, this was chosen by the planning officer. As we go down the platform,

Now, there’s still a little bit of work left to be done at the end here. So in about seven or eight weeks time, the maintenance contractor, you can hear Sisk working away in the rooms, so I’m not sure entirely what the scope is in there,

But I think they bring in the waiting rooms back into commission so people can when when there is a bit of wind and rain on the platforms, people can get out that way. Yeah. The barrow crossing itself which is down at the end, that would previously be how people with reduced mobility

Would access over the platform. So they would contact a member of the staff from GWR if a member of the staff present. Yeah. If it wasn’t a member of the staff and they wouldn’t be able to access through the gate,

So they would contact a member of staff, they would come and open the gates within the cross over the barrier across in there. When the light is lit to ensure that there are no trains coming, they would come up through. Yeah, now that we’ve got the disabled access footbridge in place,

The barrow crossing can be removed. Bob, who we just met, he when he was coming down the line out to go to Newton Abbot change and then come back up, if there’s no staff that evening. So putting the access for all bridge in

Has been a massive benefit for the public and you know it’s not really been fully utilized through tourist season yet. We only finished the bridge works October-November. Yeah. And then getting the lift commissioned October November so you know hopefully it gives a bit more of a boost to the community in Dawlish coming

Through the summer. Yeah so Right, that’s a little bit around the station. So what we’re going to see now, jack? We’ll down on to the sea wall and have a look at the completed product. I’ll walk through some of the kind of problems

Or the challenges that we have to overcome as we were delivering the works. And no doubt about you’ve probably got a bit of footage, you can put in with those as you’ve been doing the recording and over the years now, certainly I’ve I’ve been organizing it for the storm video,

But yes, lets have a look. So all three underpass sections underneath Colonnade Viaduct are now open. We have the final kind of walk through with the RAM team, which is the route asset manager from Network Rail. It was actually yesterday

And what we do on that tour is we hand the assett over to the maintainer, then, we give them the operation and operation manuals on how they have to maintain and operate the different parts of the structure that we’ve built. So for this specific section of the wall,

We have a different RAM to what the station platforms would be. So this would be taken over by the the civils RAM Yeah. So he will maintain the asset now that we’ve completed and it gets handed back over to the client. So there was pretty much nothing picked up because we’ve been snagging

The works as we’ve been going along with our rail Network Rail. One of the construction managers, Rob Newton, has been kind of snagging all the work because we’ve been complete in a section and we’ve been able to kind of complete the remaining snags as we’ve been moving on to,

What would you mean by snags, Sorry? So snag would be if, for example, the stainless fence and over here, yeah, it had one of the wires missing in here, He would go along and he would class that as a snag

And then he would say there’s there’s a wire missing,why is it not in place. So just, just, just sort of all the final fixtures. Yeah. It’s almost like what you do when you buy a new house. You go round, you create a photo report, you tell the builder what the issues are,

And they have the chance to rectify those issues. And explain why they can’t rectify those issues. So we’re still in the stilling basin area. This is what we classed the section S this was probably the most difficult part of the all of the projects combined to build.

Yeah. So in total we’ve between the three phases, So Marine Parade, which is just beyond the breakwater going in that direction. Yeah. And between Coast Guards to Colonnade we split up into two packages. We’ve delivered £80 million worth of work down here for Network Rail

And we are now working on the cliffs in the background over there. So you can see the cliffs just above the tunnel portal. Yeah. And then running down all the way to the where Morgan Sindalls have created the rockfall shelter. And in that package of work, we’re now drilling around about

60 kilometers of bar into the cliff and stabilising the cliffs. It’s such a completely different project to this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is really heavy-duty civil engineering and that project over there is is largely a geotechnical solution. Yeah and with that one, most of the work you doing, you don’t see

Because it’s all in the cliffs. And it’s just one activity whereas here we are having big cranes in to lift the bridge in. Yeah, we would divert and rivers out the way so we could, construct a permanent at all different shapes and sizes of precast different materials, different finishes. You know, this was,

This is a very complex project to manage given the location that it was in. So we’re going to have to show the viewers over there in the coming weeks. Yeah, Yeah, you can. We’ll take you round over the next coming weeks.

We’ve put in a road network across the top of the cliffs to enable us to get onto the cliffs with our drilling equipment. I’m sure we’ll go over that in the next couple of weeks and you can have a look at we’re working with Cams of Richies at the moment,

Which is is a subdivision of the BAM group. The same as Bam nuttall, like us. So CAMS working on one side and Richies are working on the other side. So in the next couple of weeks I’ll take you around and we can have a look. So the stilling basin itself.

We’ve obviously got the open channel in the middle. So this is actually probably the cleanest I’ve seen it since we’ve to, since we’ve opened up. And that’s largely due to the amount of rainfall that you get in winter. So the channel itself is self cleansed.

And so what that means is, is when sand and sediment builds up in the front of this basin, over time the water will push it back out. And that’s been designed into the gradient and the levels, you know, through.

So when you do get any easterlies, sand does push into this corner of the of the coastline here and especially up against the breakwater because the sand is not able to migrate over the breakwater. Yeah. So what you end up with is with the buildup of sand

In this basin area here, but you have a you have a storm or a heavy amount of rainfall and it flushes it right out. I mean, I’ve seen this water when we have to remember when we got the storm. Yeah it was November. That’s right. Yeah.

And the water was probably about 500 mil higher and it was just it was gushing out and ferociously flowing out the front of here. Yeah. So you can actually see the rock pools that probably the first time since you put them in. Yeah.

So they the slabs this 3,6, 9, 12, 15 slabs in here that pre-cast. Yeah. And all of those slabs are tied together with reinforced concrete beams around that and a reinforced concrete slab underneath the culvert as you go underneath there. And the rock pools are designed to, to promote marine growth. Yeah.

The same as what the around the edge of this basin area is here. So we put the same finish on this as we do on the facing and panels and that’s called a Reckli ucom finish Yes, it’s a, it’s a form line of product that the precast manufacturer

Over in Ireland puts on the on the front of the mold. When they pull the concrete into the mold that finish is then replicated onto the front face of the concrete. And you can see the green, the starting to come in here.

And that’s exactly what we’re after, the same as what’s on Marine Parade. I think it looks better once it’s weathered. Yeah, definitely. It’s not a okay, it’s not grey concrete. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we build in the permanent works over here.

One of our problems and the main problems which we had deliver in this section is that we had to divert Dawlish water out of the way and maintain the flow of the river coming down. And because this is classed as a main river work and within 60 meters

Of a main river you have to do a flood risk activity permit for. So it details to the environmental agency how we’re going to assess and manage the flood upstream and what we’re going to do in the permanent and temporary case to not make flooding any worse in the local area.

So in terms of the local area, I mean, Dawlish upstream in the community are not flooding houses. So all of that had to be modeled. We had to assess it for different kind of storm events, different kind of tide cycles. Obviously, if it’s high tide and the water’s coming down,

It doesn’t go out to sea as quick because you’ve got that backlog of water pushing it back up the channel, especially in spring tides. So all that had to be managed while we were diverting everything out the way. So we built the temporary channel

Over there, completed all of the permanent works over this side, and diverted the water back onto the permanent channel once we completed it. Another one of our problems as we were delivering the works was logistics. So as you look behind over there, you’ve got the three underpass spans and

As you can see, there’s very little height in the past section, so on this. But on this side itself, we dropped the height of the floor and around about 500 mil. Yeah. Just to give us a bit more room and then we, we redesigned all of the precast units

On this phase so they fit underneath the underpass section. Yeah. And that was one of our main constraints really. How do we deliver all of the pre cash units? How do we get the concrete here. Yeah. When we’re working in such a tight and tight working area, you know,

When the tides in all that we’ve got the public access side of the station building along the top here and we had a very small area at the front to this basin area. So if you remember when we had the wave walker here,

We had the containers and we built like a refuge to store all our plant to materials in. And some days we’d come in and we’d be totally washed out after half of store. Absolutely. Because you have to use a boat to bring most of the the larger machinery in didn’t you, Yeah.

So we use the Terramare which was part of MTS. Then it went to KMS and I think it’s changed again now. Sold again. Yeah. Captain Killick. Yeah. Yeah. I think you still, I think you still operating the vessle. All of the machines we had to deliver via

The marine environment, so they were put onto the landing craft at Teignmouth and delivered down to the scheme. So some of the bigger machines we would have to take apart the machines and rebuild the machines on site. Right. Which, which again is another task, building the 70 tonne machine back

Together on site when you could only deliver 50 ton pieces of kit max max gross weight on that vessel, Yeah. Couple of the other constraints in this area obviously the tide itself. Yeah I’m working around the tides. That was a challenge for all of the guys.

You know, I say all the time, I take my hat off to all, all the ladies and gents that work down there delivering the work in the tidal environment, because the tide moves anywhere from half an hour to an hour and a half each day,

Depending on where you are in the lunar cycle and dependent on whether you have a full moon or half a moon or crest of a moon. It depends the sort of access that you would get on to the beach and we would call that spring neap tides. Yeah. And for those those people

Who don’t know much about tides, basically in spring tides, she would get a very high tide and the very low tide. So the tide would come right up the wall at high tide and at low tide, it would push right the way back out could be like between five meters,

About five meters in Dawlish used to be roughly five meters difference in six in the period of 6 hours. And then neap tides could be as little as half a metre the tide barely moved off the wall. And that was when we would have challenges delivering the work.

But we would also have challenges delivering the work with extremely high tides because if there was a storm, that is when you would get the most amount of impact on the seawall and the work area and obviously the main one would work adjacent to an open railway line

Throughout all the way throughout the work we’ve not closed other than the possessions we have on a Saturday night, we’ve not closed the operation of the railway line to complete any of the works that we’ve done, which was one of the main requirements from the client and the serious challenge.

Yeah, but you’ve done it. Yeah. So there’s a different construction with the way that you’ve got the blocks and the facingpanels here. At the main reason for that is when we, when we had our refuge protected all of our plant here and we had the wave walker onsite. Yeah.

Because the wave walker was so big it couldn’t actually walk any further in that direction because it would have been walking over the breakwater over our work area. So it meant that we had to come up with a different construction methodology here. So that’s why we’ve got the blocks.

So the blocks have Reckli ucon finish. Yeah. And then the facing panels for the first 42 panels in front of the station building have Reckli Pomern and that’s almost like a stone finish. And you can see the old arches, which we had a 3D scan of the station building done before.

We backfilled up behind them. They were benches, you could sit on before, and we had the arches replicated through into the front, the face and panels. So Shay Murtagh have delivered that for us. Yeah. Provided that service for us as well as all of the pre

Cast units that you can see inclusive of the foot bridge. Yeah. So we worked over in Shays for four or five years down here now and you know, the product, the products and the service that they offer a Yeah, right. It’s like when we went over to Ireland

Was just incredible to see how they operate and just, just about so efficient, you know, and you can see the quality of the products is extremely good. And to think as well, you know, they run in 50 jobs for clients like you as well.

So like a job like this, plus another 49 clients, I just just can’t get my head around it. And then after you’ve got the arches, then it goes back to a 42 face and panels. It goes back to Reckli Ucon finish all the way down to Coastguards Bridge.

And when you get to Coastguards Bridge, there’s another section which we’ve got an artistic impression cost in the face of that. So as you look at that from sea, you can see almost like a life sized version of what we covered up in terms of the bridge. That’s right, yeah.

Because there used to be a natural dip in the promenade down there. That’s right. Because this is this two and a half meters higher than the old sea wall, two and half meters here, down there it’s probably more like four meters,

Because where they built the old boat house back down, that didn’t dip down for members of the public reduced mobility It was a no go zone. You couldn’t go through that. Yeah. And there’s lots of shale all of the time, wasn’t there.

So just on that, as you do come back underneath in the past now you’ve got the DDA compliant ramp going back down to the beach. Yeah. To get you onto Coast Guard Beach. Yeah. And on the opposite side over there, then you have the ramp going back up onto

Marine Parade again DDA compliant and then the ramp going down onto Marine Parade Beach. So members of the public reduced mobility, you can access both beaches now which previously they couldn’t. Probably the other more challenging things to build on the job and

Our engineering team and Botts who we use to are reinforced concrete supplyer on this it was the link bridge so the link bridge itself, the reason why this is so difficult to build in situ is because there is no consistent cross section as you look underneath the bridge

The bridge kind of caves in from one end. Yeah. And as a very thin kind of strip along. And then on the outside, I just got this, this natural kind of camber bridge. You come around. So yeah, on either side, roughly at the center span,

The bridge does actually start to concave back in on itself. Yeah. Which is a really difficult thing to do out of wood. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. It’s almost like building three boats out of wood. Highly skilled engineers. Underneath the existing underpass sections, there’s all new lighting and underneath the link bridge itself

Here you’ve got strip lighting which comes and illuminates all of the promenade. It looks gorgeous at night. Yeah, prior to coming out there was no lighting whatsoever. So you’ve got a normal paving on the floor here. And then from that boundary line, that way you’ve got the existing bridge,

You’ve got the new granite sets. So we basically replicated what was underneath the existing bridge that. Okay. And then all of this is new granite. So you’ve got pink Portuguese granite here and gray Portuguese granite here. In total, there’s about 140,000 individual granite sets that have been installed on this project.

They all have to be put in by hand. Yeah, that’s a very long task. Some sore knees. As you come up the top, then you come up onto Section B, so a double width staircase and as you come over the top of the seawall then

To get we have a when we’re working on a sea wall and when we build new things, we have certain standards to maintain. So if anywhere there’s an open edge, we have to have 1.25 meters in height. Yeah. So anywhere there is granite sets as you walk along,

This wall will be classed these as public viewing areas. Yeah. And the reason why the stainless steel fence on there rather than bringing the concrete higher is so that if people come up here on wheelchairs they can see over the sea wall and appreciate the view. Yeah.

So, this stainless steel handrail isn’t continuous all the way down. We’ve got three individual viewing platforms as you go along with seating in. And then we’ve also got all the public seating that we’ve put up here. This is all the stone from the old sea wall, isn’t it. That’s it. Yeah. repurposed.

So most of these we actually cut off the existing wall, slice the existing wall, picked them up with a block grab and then rebuilt them all in positions down here. Yeah. The floodgate that you can see there is an emergency exit for the station platforms.

It does also have a bar on the bottom that spins down. And if there is a large amount of overtopping on this in, in the event of a one on one in 100 year storm event, the floodgates are closed at the bottom to stop any water going back on the track.

Before we built any of the seawall here, phase one and phase two included. Network Rail did I have a problem where the waves would hit the wall, come straight up over the track and cover the station building, And all the water would end up in the track

And we class that as the fore foot in between two rails and it would actually act like a canal through Dawlish station. So trains would be running and they wouldn’t actually be able to see what they’re running on because that would be that much water.

So they would at that point, then they have to shut down the line. Yeah, prior to us completing this phase and that phase, I’ve not actually seen a scenario like that where the track has been covered even now. You’ve put in a much more robust drainage system.

So on both sides we’ve installed new track drainage and the track drainage is connected to the catch pits which are in the promenade or in the station and then the outfall into the sea. So roughly every 20 facing panels or every sorry, every 10 facing panels,

20 meters on the front of the sea wall, you’ll see a big hole, and that’s to deal with the track drainage in the event of a storm. Is it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. As you come back over this, then we go back down onto the Marine parade approach. On the left hand side,

The planning officer and the designer opted for a wooden finish on here. There’s almost like a leaning edge so people can almost admire the view. Yeah, and I love taking photos from here when we got some storms. Yeah. Yeah, well, not quite storms. Rough seas, Rough seas. Yeah. Yeah.

So, yeah, you get a great view up here with the waves hitting the front of the sea wall. If there is a bit of a bit of a swell in the right direction. Yeah. And you get some great footage from up here and to be honest,

The council are keeping this area extremely well maintained. Absolutely. Yeah. It’s really like we’re halfway through winter now, and you can see how clean it is. Yeah, well maintained. I’ve seen them out a lot of mornings. Yeah, it’s great keeping things swept up and tidy. In the storm event,

You do you still get some material which comes up onto the walls and that eventually finds itself back down into here. Prior to a starting in this section, the council did have a really big problem with water management. Yeah, because the underpass sections used to

They the level of them you can have almost like a belly in it. And they used to just fill up with water and sand and people wouldn’t be able to access it. You couldn’t even walk underneath the viaduct. Yeah. So all of the new surface levels that we’ve introduced in here

Aim to basically divert all of the water back into the open channel so everything kind of drops down and works its way back into the open channel and back out to sea. And it’s amazing to see how affective the drainage does actually work. Yeah, absolutely. It definitely does work.

So again, the hand railing on both of these, we use Stoneman Engineering again. Yeah. And they work alongside Botts to get the bolt clusters for these cast into the concrete as we were producing that. And that was, that was one of our difficult challenges because of the way that these,

These plates bolt into the actual bridge itself. Yeah. So there’s a lot of thought and a lot of timber work that went into getting those brackets in the right place so that when Stoneman came to install the uprights, all the centers worked out perfectly and everything was vertical and looks, looks very nice.

Yeah. And now this is start to weather as well. I quite like this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. On the right hand side we’ve got the line side fencing which connects back into the Marine parade fencing which we’ve done, which is not a stainless steel product that’s galvanized product. Yeah.

And then as you’re looking down there now, you can actually see our guys just working upon the cliffs at the top, taking the netting off of nearly complete our drilling but we’ll cover a bit more with phase four over the next week. Thank you, Jack, for another informative tour. Don’t forget part

Two of this video will be published next week on the 9th of March, so to get a reminder, please make sure you click like, hit the subscribe button and share this with your friends. Thanks for watching and we’ll see you next week.