North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

Bridges 24 & 25 are an absolute scandal. Heads should have rolled over them. For those that don't know, the decks are significantly higher than the originals. How such a failure of project management occurred is beyond my understanding.

Sawdust.

 

Heads did roll in that the civil engineer either resigned or was sacked. The official answer was resigned to pursue other interests.
The track is on an embankment and there is not enough width to raise the level to match.

 

It'll be expensive, but isn't the solution to lower the abutments, so the bridges are at the correct height?

Sawdust.

 

I believe the proposed remediation (which is a consequence of the initial contractor going bust) involves the building of retaining structures to secure additional ballast raising the track level either side of and between the two bridges?

 

So a bodge that will stand out as being a bodge, you think that is really acceptable? This is what comes from a culture of not questioning things. Did nobody at board level ask questions about the abutments needing alteration? Particularly as the abutments on bridge 30 needed modification. This was a major failure of project planning, it should have been spotted a long before work on site began. This kind of monumental cock up should have seen directors of both boards resign but instead the truth has been gradually becoming more widely known about.
At what point did the contractor go bust, was it before or after they were paid? If they were paid why were they paid when it was a complete **** up? Didn't they have insurers? Couldn't a claim be made against them?

Sawdust.

 

I do not know the answer to your questions, in fact I am unfamiliar with the bridges.
However you make the "solutions options" sound so simple.
Have you ever tried getting liquidated damages back on a contract that has one. Or getting an insurance claim paid, especially if the contractor has folded.
There seems to have been from what you have just said a number of parties involved in the repair of these bridges, who will be able to unscramble the party who is to blame with recourse to the courts, does the railway have the money for that? From what has been said I suspect not.
If you place the blame firmly at the project planning phase then who undertook that and against what specification? Was that an internal railway activity or subcontracted? If the railway undertook the scope and the planning who do you propose to "go after"?

 

I have no idea who to go after as you put it but as far as I can tell what actually happened was sweeping the whole affair under the carpet. What I'm saying is that through collective responsibility more than one head should have rolled. There isn't even the money for the bodge after quite a few years, let alone anything else.
But it would appear from the current farrago of bridge 42 that lessons might not have been learned.

Sawdust.