GONOM Train journeys from the driver's seat

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Coastal railways: why lines by the sea are so hard to build and keep open

Why railways follow the sea, and why waves, landslides and storms make coastal track so hard to keep, from the Cinque Terre and Spain's north coast to Japan and Korea.

The narrow strip by the sea

A coast looks like an easy place for a railway. Towns and harbours grew up along it, the ground between sea and hills is often the flattest available, and a line along the shore needs no mountain pass. Many of the most watched cab rides follow the sea for exactly this reason. But that narrow strip is also where the land is least stable and the weather most violent, and a coastal railway is attacked from two sides: waves and salt spray from the sea, falling rock and slipping soil from the slopes above.

Engineers have only a few answers. They can build a sea wall and lay the track on top, accepting that the sea will keep striking it. They can cut a ledge into the cliff, or go into the rock and run in tunnels between brief glimpses of water. Or they can give up the shore and move the line inland. Each of GONOM's coastal films shows one or more of these choices, and once you know what to look for, you can read a coast's railway history from the cab.

What the sea does to a railway

The south Devon coast in England shows what can go wrong. At Dawlish, the main line to the south-west of England runs along a sea wall at the foot of red cliffs. On 4 and 5 February 2014 a severe storm washed part of the wall and the railway away, cutting off the only railway line to the south-west for eight weeks. Network Rail has since built a stronger, taller sea wall about 800 m long there. Dawlish is not on GONOM, but it is the textbook case of how exposed a seaside line can be.

The damage is not only from great storms. Salt eats into rails, fastenings and overhead wires; waves scour away the ground under embankments; wet cliffs send rock and mud down onto the track. Lines on exposed coasts are often slowed or stopped when high winds and waves are forecast, and their maintenance never really ends. That is why so many coastal lines are slow, single track or partly hidden in tunnels, and why a coastal cab ride often shows less sea than you expect.

Into the rock: the Cinque Terre and Spain's north coast

The railway along the Ligurian coast took the tunnel answer further than almost any other. Between Sestri Levante and La Spezia, 44 km of line needed 51 tunnels with a combined length of more than 28 km, plus 23 bridges. Building it meant fighting landslides and storms, with materials often brought in by sea, and the line was single track at first; the last section was doubled only in 1971. In the Cinque Terre Coast Line film, the five villages appear as short bursts of houses and sea between long tunnels, because the stations sit in the gaps.

Spain's Ferrol–Gijón railway faced a broken coast of estuaries and headlands. The single-track metre-gauge line needed 110 tunnels and 27 viaducts, and it was finished only in 1972, 86 years after it was first planned. The GONOM film, from Ribadeo to Viveiro on the Lugo shore of Galicia, starts at the Eo estuary. Watch how the line stays a little back from the water, crossing river mouths on viaducts, and how the Cantabrian Sea opens on the right after Burela.

The Sea of Japan: the Gonō Line

The Gonō Line in northern Tōhoku was built from both ends, from 1908 in the south and 1918 in the north, edging section by section along a coast with few flat places to lay track until the two met in 1936. For long stretches the track runs just a few metres above the water, threading between low cliffs, rocky inlets and small fishing harbours. In the Resort Shirakami film the Sea of Japan is almost always on the left, and at Senjōjiki a wide, flat rock terrace lies at the water's edge.

Being that close to the sea has a price. In winter, when the seasonal pressure pattern brings strong winds and high waves to the Sea of Japan side, trains on the Gonō Line are delayed or suspended, and Japanese railway reporting treats this as the known downside of its scenery. If you plan a winter ride after watching the film, leave room in your plans for a train that does not run.

Korea: new lines stand back, old ones become parks

Korea's east coast shows how attitudes have changed. The new Donghae Line from Pohang to Samcheok, completed in 2025, mostly keeps a little inland among forested hills, so in the film the sea comes into view only now and then on the right. North of Donghae, the train joins the older Yeongdong Line, which from Mukho runs close to the shore. Watch for Jeongdongjin, where the platform sits right beside the beach and which is often described as the station closest to the sea in Korea.

In Busan the third answer, moving inland, has already happened. The Donghae Nambu Line, completed between Busan and Ulsan in 1935, ran for decades on a single track along the slope just above the sea. When it was rebuilt as a double-track railway, trains left this stretch in 2013, and it reopened in 2020 as Haeundae Blue Line Park. In the GONOM film a slow Sky Capsule glides along an elevated rail above the old track, where the Beach Train still runs, from Cheongsapo to Mipo. GONOM's Busan subway map shows how to reach it.

Fjords and sea lochs

In Norway and Scotland the sea reaches deep inland, and the railway meets it in sheltered water rather than on an open shore. The Ofoten Line is cut into steep mountainsides high above the Rombaksfjord and reaches sea level only at Narvik, the ice-free port that is the reason the line exists. The Nordland Line runs close to the Trondheimsfjord for its first hours out of Trondheim and follows the water again on its final run into Bodø. Here the difficulty is the mountain more than the waves.

The Mallaig extension of the West Highland Line follows the north shore of Loch Eil, a long sea loch, then drops to the coast at Lochailort and weaves along the sea lochs of Arisaig, with the islands of Eigg and Rum offshore on a clear day. Past Morar, look for the white sands by the estuary before the line ends at the fishing harbour of Mallaig. Compared with the open coast of the Gonō Line or Dawlish, these are sheltered waters, and the railway's battles here are with rock and gradient rather than with the sea.

Watch these journeys on GONOM

Subway maps mentioned

Busan

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