Fire Risk

Understood, but it does demonstrate the long term costs of cutting that maintenance activity - which is why I'm with @Britfoamer in despairing of the long term future.

NR scythed an embankment near me a few years ago, and it's now starting to look as though they'd never done the work - yet the growth of trees and shrubs means there's not only a risk to the stability of the earthworks but also fouling of the overhead.

 

From my limited (no railway but similar) experience as much as anything the big issue will be the change in which maintenance is managed and staffed, not meaning to teach anyone to suck eggs, but in the 'good old days' railway (And other owners of massive infrastructure estates) employed large direct work forces who often had time when they were not doing job 'x' and thus would be directed towards things like veg clearance, painting etc etc just basically to keep their actively occupied as you were paying them.

Move to the latter 20th century and suddenly everything is outsourced in packages to external contractors and thus yes they may set a contract to clear veg off an embankment, but once that is done there is no contract in place to continue to maintain it so nature just takes its course, where I worked it was plan odd insofar as they still had a fair bit of direct labour but what they were allowed to do seemed to diminish year on year (possibly as an excuse to eventually get rid I don't know I haven't worked there for years), so for instance at one stage if I happened to see some vegetation damaging a heritage asset I could ring the local manager (or TBH circumvent that and just ring the local guy I knew who worked that patch) and they would pop out with their van and ladders and remove, it later changed to having to report via the online system (which it was generally accepted was not fit for purpose), it then going to a contracts manager down south somewhere and being gathered up into the next work package on that stretch which could be in years time, if at all.