Refreshing the Island Line’s Historic Ryde Pier on the Isle of Wight

Engineers working to improve Ryde Pier have provided a progress update after battling through winter storms to give the Victorian pier a new lease of life. The railway line between Ryde Esplanade and Ryde Pier Head has been closed since October 2022 to allow engineers to strengthen the 686-metre-long Victorian pier that was built in 1880.

The strengthening work is part of a wider programme of maintenance and improvements on Ryde Pier. South Western Railway (SWR) will soon begin platform improvements at Ryde Esplanade along with vital track maintenance, as part of the joint project.

Over the course of the winter, engineers continued refurbishing and strengthening the structure and were faced with several challenges, meaning that the programme has been extended further into the spring.

Part of the challenges of working in a marine environment came from the severe weather conditions through December and January, which caused safety concerns meaning that work had to temporarily be paused.

This also had a knock-on effect to the installation of scaffolding, which meant the project has been pushed back slightly.

Mark Killick, Network Rail’s Wessex Route Director, said: ‘We’ve been faced with several weather-related challenges on the Isle of Wight but with the worst behind us we’re pleased to see that progress has been made at Ryde Pier. I’d like to thank customers for bearing with us whilst we carry out this complex renewal to give Ryde Pier a new lease of life. We recognise that winter is a challenging time of year to carry out work due to the unpredictable weather, but at the same time if we were to carry this work out during the summer period, it would cause more disruption to customers and tourism on the Isle of Wight. Apart from the weather, one of the major challenges we faced is that our time on site is limited by the fact that we have to work around the tides.

The work aims to extend the life of the structure for decades to come, improving the overall reliability of the line, allowing SWR to run trains on the Isle of Wight long into the future.