• Our booking engine at tickets.railforums.co.uk (powered by TrainSplit) helps support the running of the forum with every ticket purchase! Find out more and ask any questions/give us feedback in this thread!

Line blocked at Dawlish

Status
Not open for further replies.

D1009

Established Member
Joined
22 Feb 2012
Messages
3,166
Location
Stoke Gifford
Indicators at Exeter Central show cancellations and delays due to a security alert at Dawlish, National Rail site shows buses replacing trains UFN due to emergency services dealing with an incident at Dawlish, anyone know what's happened ?
 
Sponsor Post - registered members do not see these adverts; click here to register, or click here to log in
R

RailUK Forums

jopsuk

Veteran Member
Joined
13 May 2008
Messages
12,771
Chatting to a friend there, the bomb squad have just detonated something loudly. Not sure if it was actually on railway property- may have been on the beach or in the town.
 

DavidBrown

Member
Joined
29 Mar 2011
Messages
234
Location
North Devon
BBC Travel News also showing the A379 closed due to a police incident. Must have happened pretty recently - trains were running fine when I was at Central at 2:30 this afternoon (heading to Honiton).
 

class57basher

Member
Joined
9 May 2011
Messages
86
SWRG has reported a package had been blown up and trains stopped. but all running normally now
 

221129

Established Member
Joined
21 Mar 2011
Messages
6,520
Location
Sunny Scotland
It was believed to be a suspicious package on the line and i must say a big well done and thankyou to all the staff at EXD who kept everyone updated (evn if the Auto Annoncements werent)
 

louis97

Established Member
Joined
14 May 2008
Messages
1,882
Location
Derby
Devon & Cornwall Police have been advised that a suspicious briefcase has been left in the doorway of National Westminster Bank. Dawlish Police are treating this as a security alert and have imposed a 100 metre exclusion zone which includes the railway

Bomb squad executed a controlled explosion on the briefcase.
 

CC 72100

Established Member
Joined
23 Jan 2012
Messages
3,777
Very dramatic! Saw the chaos on live departure boards earlier! Typical: First Sunday after the sunday closures finish, and we've already got disruption :P

Sounds like a good effort by all involved to sort it out as best as possible
 

jopsuk

Veteran Member
Joined
13 May 2008
Messages
12,771
A type writer apparently. With a sheet of paper with the words "April Fools" typed on it.
 

JGR

Member
Joined
31 Jan 2012
Messages
147
Location
Ipswich
A type writer apparently. With a sheet of paper with the words "April Fools" typed on it.
Perhaps I'm getting old, but April fools jokes seem to be more of a nuisance than anything else these days.

The passengers I spoke to on the delayed and overcrowded XC service which I got from Birmingham at (nominally) 2103 were not happy about having being held up by it.
That said, it was only running 25 or so minutes late when I got off at Burton-on-Trent.
 

tsr

Established Member
Joined
15 Nov 2011
Messages
7,400
Location
Between the parallel lines
If that is indeed what it contained, I hope they lock the blighter who did it up for a long time.

I concur. If, however, someone has made light of a serious security issue by claiming it was an April Fools' Day joke and it was more serious, that's not particularly funny either.
 

tsr

Established Member
Joined
15 Nov 2011
Messages
7,400
Location
Between the parallel lines
if this was the case, wouldn't he be the fool? ;)

Either that, or the population of Dawlish managed to overlook the briefcase until the afternoon. Since security there was probably not at a particularly heightened level, that is perhaps understandable, although it should serve as another reminder that suspicious (although not necessarily dangerous) items can crop up in many places at many different times.

I wonder if the person who did this planted it in the morning, got bored with waiting by the afternoon, and then made a hoax call to the police (thereby committing another serious couple of offences, namely making a bomb hoax and making an intentionally false emergency call to the police, of course)?
 

brillopad

Member
Joined
5 Feb 2011
Messages
115
Either that, or the population of Dawlish managed to overlook the briefcase until the afternoon. Since security there was probably not at a particularly heightened level, that is perhaps understandable, although it should serve as another reminder that suspicious (although not necessarily dangerous) items can crop up in many places at many different times.

I wonder if the person who did this planted it in the morning, got bored with waiting by the afternoon, and then made a hoax call to the police (thereby committing another serious couple of offences, namely making a bomb hoax and making an intentionally false emergency call to the police, of course)?

A few years ago in St Ives a chap known for being a bit weird called in a carrier bag on the harbour front - in no time there was blue tape everywhere and the harbour was shut down on a busy summers day - awaiting the bomb squad a shop owner calmly walked through the tape and returned with a carrier bag containing bottles of water.

While this nonsense was going on there were any amount of bin bags out for collection but nobody though they were about to explode.
 

sbt

Member
Joined
12 Oct 2011
Messages
268
Sadly, its not nonsense.

Remember, to some people all that stopping at Level Crossing Barriers is a 'Nonsense', after all most of the time it takes minutes for the train to arrive... most of the time.

If that bag _had_ been a 'live one' his fellow shopkeepers would have no doubt thanked him for removing most of the front of their shops and the people whose job it is would have thoroughly enjoyed scraping him off the architecture and dealing with his family. Just as railwaymen enjoy the aftermath of a train that did arrive at the crossing as scheduled.

Its a balancing act at crossings, trains _could_ be halted short of them and then cross at walking pace or people _could_ be allowed to take their chances without warnings or barriers. Society, including the railways, has made a judgement on the best way to minimise the risk to road and rail users without disrupting either to extreme levels.

With IEDs its a balancing act, disruption to ordinary life again loss of life. Both achieve the bad guys ends in one way or another.

BTW, if you do spot a potential device, please don't do bright stuff like moving it, especially into a bin or bucket of water. Not only is it quite possible you will set it off if it is a real device, it also makes it difficult to access for the people who have to investigate it. And a difficult to access 'False Alarm' may require a controlled explosion to 'investigate' where, left where it was, less disruptive means could have been used.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Top