costal engineering

The section of railway which runs along the coastline of south Devon in United Kingdom, from Exeter to Newton Abbot, is one of the most photographed sections of railway in the world. It was opened in 1846 with embankments and seawalls protecting and supporting the railway, providing the route of an atmospheric railway. Despite regular maintenance however, there has been a history of storm damage, one of the most severe occurring in February 2014. This resulted in the collapse of the line, interruption of all rail traffic into and out of the far South-West of the United Kingdom (affecting parts of Devon and the whole of Cornwall) and significant damage to the region’s economy. In order to improve the resilience of the line, in 2016 HR Wallingford and CH2M considered several options to evaluate and reduce climate change impacts to the railway utilising the nearshore wave and sea level data sets developed as part of the State of the Nation project. The analysis carried out for this section of coastline is described in Roca et al., (2016), and this paper describes a similar process required for this coursework. For your coursework, you are required to establish the dimensions of a rock armoured revetment (crest height, toe level, structure slope etc.) to protect the railway line at Dawlish against excessive overtopping taking account of a need to maintain a suitable view of the estuary. You have been provided with the appropriate State of the Nation dataset, representative of 10,000 years of extreme events (this will be uploaded to Moodle. The specific tasks required are given below. In all cases, you have to clearly demonstrate how you have carried out each task, including where appropriate any specific knowledge of the site