Dawlish Sea Wall — Marine Parade

Marine Parade is the stretch of the new high-level promenade, on top of the rebuilt sea wall, between Dawlish station and Boat Cove; the promenade continues north past the station to the Coastguards footbridge. Standing on it, you are on the seaward side of the railway with the beach below you and the double track, the town and its red sandstone headlands behind the line. Trains pass at close range and at line speed, and because Dawlish station sits about 350 m (1,150 ft) to the north you can watch local Riviera Line trains stop there before they run past and disappear into Kennaway Tunnel under the headland at Boat Cove, about 150 m (500 ft) to the south. Paths lead on foot to Coryton Cove and, northwards along the original sea wall, towards Langstone Rock and Dawlish Warren, so a visit can cover several angles in an hour or two. The signalling on this stretch allows trains to run on the landward track during storms, keeping them further from the waves. In rough weather waves can break over the wall onto the promenade and the railway, which is what made this stretch famous, but it is also when the promenade can be closed and trains stopped.

This is a working seaside town rather than open countryside. The line runs at sea level between the sand of Dawlish beach and the town, with the red sandstone cliffs and headlands typical of this coast cut through by short tunnels towards Teignmouth. The 2020–2023 wall is 8 m (26 ft) tall, 2.5 m (8 ft) taller than the one it replaced, and carries a wide accessible promenade above the beach. Out to sea the view opens across Lyme Bay; to the north, the sandbar of Dawlish Warren and the mouth of the Exe estuary are visible on a clear day. At high tide with an onshore wind, spray and full waves reach the promenade; at low tide a wide beach separates the wall from the water.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel built the line along the shore between Exeter and Newton Abbot for the South Devon Railway in the 1840s, carrying it on a sea wall between the cliffs and the beach. It was worked by Brunel's atmospheric system, with trains drawn by a piston in a pipe laid between the rails, only from 13 September 1847 until 9 September 1848, after which conventional locomotives took over. The exposed alignment has been damaged by the sea throughout its history. In the storms of February 2014 the wall at Dawlish was breached, washing away around 40 m (130 ft) of it and leaving the track hanging; Network Rail says the railway between Exeter and Newton Abbot was shut for eight weeks, and the first train ran again on 4 April 2014. Network Rail then began replacing the wall on Marine Parade in summer 2019 as part of its South West Rail Resilience Programme. The first 360 m (1,180 ft) section opened in July 2020 and the second, with 415 m (1,360 ft) of new promenade, on 25 May 2023: an £80 million, 8 m (26 ft) wall, 2.5 m (8 ft) taller than the old one.

Few places in Britain let the public stand this close to a main line with nothing but the sea behind them: at Dawlish the promenade and the railway share the same sea wall, and the whole of the traffic between Exeter and Plymouth passes along it. The combination of red cliffs, tunnels, beach and a sea-level railway, and the national news coverage of its storm damage, has made it one of the most photographed stretches of railway in the country.