Osborne Completes £2 Million Work Ahead of Schedule on Isle of Wight

Work to repair storm damage to the Island Line on the Isle of Wight has finished ahead of schedule, allowing services to resume from today (Friday 20 March).

Repair work, that was expected to take ten weeks, began on Monday 12 January and engineers from Osborne have worked hard to complete the project as quickly as possible. As a result the Island Line has reopened a day earlier than anticipated.

The repairs involved the installation of two high level steel retaining walls, one at the base of the bank that has been inserted four metres into the ground and a second at the top of the bank, nine metres deep. Some 4,000 tonnes of new granular fill material was brought in to re-grade the slope and to help avoid a build-up of water behind the retaining walls, weep holes and drainage was dug.

Osborne also took advantage of the line closure to undertake normal track maintenance during the daytime. Some signalling components, rails and sleepers were replaced along with maintenance at the sub-station.

As a result of continued positive feedback from passengers, an adjustment has also been made to the regular timetable. From today, the last services from Shanklin and Ryde Pier Head have been retimed to run later. These times will provide better connections to the late Wightlink Catamarans.

Network Rail’s Project Sponsor Bernard Fanning said, “We are delighted to have completed this work ahead of schedule enabling services to re-start earlier than expected. Thanks to the hard work of the project team and the commitment of our contractors Osborne and Raymond Brown, any challenges were dealt with safely and efficiently allowing services to return to normal as soon as possible.”

Graham Stevens from Osborne said, “We are delighted to have finished this work ahead of schedule and are pleased to have a full passenger service back in use.”