When our Rail Services arrived at Swanley to inspect the underside of a rail bridge that is situated over the busy A20 slip road which leads onto the M25 at Swanley Junction, our site supervisor and engineer noticed that approximately 3 tonnes of track ballast had fallen from the tracks above and onto the maintenance walkway. To prevent putting workers at risk and potentially causing a catastrophic incident on the live carriageway below, the team quickly began removing as much ballast as possible with buckets and escalated the issue with our customer and our Road Space team.
Collaborating with Tarmac who were also carrying out works on the road and our Road Space team, the team planned an extra road closure, extra resources, had a MEWP arranged to safely remove the remaining ballast and completed the surveys as originally planned all within just two nights!
Well done and thank you to everyone involved, your quick thinking, attentiveness and proactive behaviour potentially prevented a severe accident from occurring.
