News coming in of a derailment near Saint-Benoit on the "train des Pignes" in the south of France - a metre-gauge local/tourist/heritage line from Nice to Digne.

First reports are that a train struck a rock on the line, and poor weather is hampering the emergency response. A carriage turned over resulting in two fatalities and seven injured.

News report with picture here. Evidently the carriage's departure from the track was much more dramatic that the early reports suggested.

The RUSs^▸ (Route Utilisation Strategy) favoured "skip-stop", which only gets you a small time gain - nothing like a true fast or semi-fast. That would need to run on the main lines, which was considered but rejected because there is no grade separated crossing onto them. The top speed would be an issue too.

But across London, the gain in time should be substantial - it's only seven miles to Canary Wharf, and with just six stops and suburban rail rather than tube timings.

Yes, I know I said "clean the ballast", and I must admit you have done that, but ...

They were filling in most of the interior of the platform, around the upright of the signal gantry. Would that be where the ground was dodgy?

They weren't using the small pump they had before, for some reason ...

The first picture also shows the track as initially aligned and sitting on top of the base ballast ... plus a wire that has to run over the wall at this point.

When I saw the cross-section of the existing wall at the break, I was struck by how insubstantial it is - more like a garden retaining wall than a proper seawall. You wonder how it has lasted so long, even with a lot a repair and maintenance each year.

As for an emergency repair, my first thought was to get some big concrete blocks and plonk them on the flat wall (path) in front of the ex-embankment. "Big" would mean big enough to stay put by their own weight - I'd guess about 20 tons or so. However, I can't find any mention of that as a standard technique, and it may not be possible to find a combination of crane size and crane siting that provides strong enough ground and adequate reach - the access road in front of the houses looks to narrow and likely to collapse. Still, I can't help feeling that there must be a method that starts with a phone call to Ainscoughs.

I can only quote this morning's Metro, alongside a slightly different picture: "The service is definitely suspended" - then repeated as "the damage to the track saw trains suspended between ... Exeter and Cornwall".

BBC^» (British Broadcasting Corporation - home page) news were reporting that Network Rail have announced their proposed plan, involving a "5-mile tunnel under Heathrow". I can't find it on their website yet, but there is this news release from NR^» (Network Rail - home page). It says the proposals have been "laid out", but not where.

Mouchel is a big engineering services company - mainly in the utilities market, and similar environment stuff. Presumably they provided the information in some way - maybe working for EA? (If you look, the colour is green then black.)

They have been erecting shuttering for the rest of the steps - though none of the bits looks so very heavy. Pictured yesterday.

I'd always assumed that P8 would be left long at this end until the other end was finished, and then chopped back. Since that won't be until the viaduct and all the new trackwork at that end is done, it would be a fairly long-term temporary arrangement.

Graham - I didn't realise for most of yesterday that the coffeeshop was up, because www.firstgreatwestern.info itself was down (index page only). That seems to be still true. I'd imagined that was the easier part to get going again.

No, - if anything had been blown off you would have heard about it on the national TV news. And by "steady wind loads" I wasn't meaning to exclude gusts - just the effects of turbulence and eddy-shedding, which are not easy to design for.

At the SW corner of the deck, the cladding looks a bit like a roller shutter. Some of it is visibly bent and has been since its installation - which gives some idea of just how flimsy it is.

I doubt it, because I've heard hail inside tin-roofed buildings before, and it is different in an important way. Hail has no fundamental note - it is essentially white noise, altered by whatever the resonances of the building are. This did have a basic frequency to it, plus the same building resonances.

J got into Reading at 16:12 this afternoon, just as a squall struck, and as usual it sprayed rain into the transfer deck. At the same time, there was a very loud noise from the roof. It was rather like a pneumatic drill down on a platform, for only a few seconds, and happened three of four times.

In such an echoey space it's very hard to say where its source was, other than somewhere in the structure, hence hard to pin down its cause. However, as it coincided with the strongest wind gusts, I guess it must be the metal cladding vibrating. If so, it is potentially quite serious, since the forces involved can be far higher than those for which the fixings are normally designed (weight and steady wind loads) and difficult to predict. And having strips of cladding ripped off and flying about is seriously bad news.

I think this is still going through one of those will-they-won't-they funding dances. The money has been devolved from DfT^» (Department for Transport - about) to the new Oxfordshire Local Transport Board but comes via the Local Enterprise Partnership. How much they get is a bit of a mystery - at least ^M10.6 over four years, but their priority list runs to ^M128, so giving 2/3 of that total to this one bridge seems a bit surprising. The initial gesstimate of total cost was ^M10, which sounds like a standard budgetting figure for an overbridge.

The proposal (as in July 2013) is:

I can't see why you would want a bridge there - it would funnel more traffic straight into the centre of town - so one of the alternatives looks a better bet.

Further down the priority list is:

This one is not being proposed for LTB?LEP^» (Local Enterprise Partnership - about) funding.