On the afternoon of 31st January 2015, a huge landslip

took place in the notorious Harbury cutting between Leamington Spa and Banbury. An estimated slippage of three hundred thousand tons of material slipped into the cutting causing the closure of the line between Birmingham and London Marylebone. Immediately, a team from Network Rail and their contractor, Murphy, sprang into action to get it repaired and stabilised. There has been a history of collapse in the cutting back to when Brunel engineered the route in the nineteenth century. The instability is caused by a series of Blue Lias clay beds that sit above a bed of limestone that becomes mobile an unstable during periods of heavy water infiltration.